Free Republic

Writing at his New York Times blog, Paul Krugman warned that those banking on Obamacare to collapse are “probably making a very bad bet.” As proof, Krugman points to the record of state-level healthcare exchanges, which by and large have been performing much better than their federal counterpart. He also cites the rising levels of Medicaid enrollment — which is occurring in both states that have and haven’t accepted the Obamacare expansion — and the slow improvement of Healthcare.gov as reasons for optimism. All in all, Krugman says, the law is “probably going to stumble through to the finish line.”...

PAUL KRUGMAN: The Deficit Is Basically Solved Walter HickeyJan. 10, 2013, 4:00 PMMany people think that fixing the deficit is a painful process that involves deep cuts to crucial programs. Some think the process is too hard, and it's not worth trying yet. That's not correct, according to a chart from from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Richard Kogan showing just how far the United States has come in the past two years. We've talked before about how the painless and most effective solution to the deficit is additional growth in GDP. As the recovery progresses and GDP...

Paul Krugman, a liberal economist and New York Times columnist, said increased government spending is key to economic recovery. During an interview on Friday on “Moyers & Company,” on PBS, Bill Moyers asked, “And you argue that this could actually be solved in two years?” …

Nobel Prize winning “economist” Paul Krugman spoke at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. last week. During the Q&A session following the lecture, an audience member asked him about the rising national debt. Earlier in the evening, Krugman had already vocalized his satisfaction at President Obama’s apparent lack of concern over the exploding cumulative deficit. However, in a moment of brutal honesty, the esteemed Princeton professor revealed his long term prognosis. According to the professor: Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising…there is this question of how we’re...

Economist and columnist Paul Krugman declared personal bankruptcy today following a failed attempt to spend his way out of debt. In a Chapter 13 filing to the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, lawyers for Krugman listed $7,346,000 in debts versus $33,000 in assets. The majority of his debts are related to mortgage financing on a $8.7 million apartment in lower Manhattan, but the list also includes $621,537 in credit card debt and $33,642 in store financing at famed jeweler Tiffanys and Co. The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004...

Paul Krugman has never been shy about proclaiming that he is right and everyone else is wrong — and not just wrong, but “knaves and fools.” Lately, however, one begins to worry that he might actually hurt himself, so vigorously has he been patting himself on the back for his opposition to “austerity” (defined as any cut in government spending, anytime, anywhere). On his latest victory lap, Krugman is celebrating two things. First, a group of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst discovered a small error in a widely cited paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff that showed...

It’s not even a picture of a crisis. The new CBO long-term budget projections are out, and while they’re not good, they don’t show crisis levels of debt even looking out a quarter-century. Unless, that is, you believe that debt of 100 percent of GDP is the end of the world even though Britain exceeded that level for a large part of its history. So budget deficits, entitlement reform, and all that simply don’t deserve to be policy priorities, let alone dominate the national discussion the way they did for the past few years.

There is no doubt that the United States is in financial disarray and the future seems quite bleak. In the next decade or so, the U.S. will face extreme difficulties paying for healthcare, making Social Security payments and pretty much keeping entitlement programs afloat. What is the solution? In a speech made earlier this year in D.C., world-renowned Keynesian economist Paul Krugman concurred that the federal government does have a financial problem. When you add an aging population and rising healthcare costs, the government lacks the necessary revenue to pay for pretty much anything. According to the Nobel Laureate, the...

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t be up for argument. But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum: It...

After studying and teaching Keynesian economics for 30 years, I conclude that the “sophisticated” Keynes­ians really do believe in magic and fairy dust. Lots of fairy dust. It may seem odd that this Aus­trian economist refers to fairies, but I got the term from Paul Krugman. According to Krugman, too many people place false hopes in what he calls the “Confidence Fairy,” a creature created as a retort to economist Robert Higgs’s concept of “regime uncertainty.” Higgs coined that expression in a 1997 paper on the Great Depression in which he claimed that uncertainty caused by the policies of Franklin...

Looking forward to Obama’s State of the Union session, New York Times economic court jester Paul Krugman beats his usual drum about the importance of deficit spending (no, that’s not a joke, it’s what passes for liberal economic wisdom) and then tries to make a case for the left’s latest meme of “inequality” over jobs. The usual suspects on the right will, as always when questions of income distribution comes up, shriek “Class warfare!” But there will also be seemingly more sober voices arguing that he has picked the wrong target, that jobs, not inequality, should be at the top...

When it comes to Krugman's views on any particular topic, he may be right and he may be wrong, but whatever his opinion he always has a much to say about it (even if the factual backing is of secondary importance or outright missing). Today, his chosen topic is inequality, and in an interview with Bloomberg's Tom Keene, shown and transcribed below, he certainly says much, encapsulated perhaps by the following gem: "There's zero evidence that the kind of extreme inequality that we have is good for economic growth. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that it is actually...

Holy seven million, Batman! The Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare, has made a stunning comeback from its shambolic start. As the March 31 deadline for 2014 coverage approached, there was a surge in applications at the “exchanges” — the special insurance marketplaces the law set up. And the original target of seven million signups, widely dismissed as unattainable, has been surpassed. But what does it mean? That depends on whether you ask the law’s opponents or its supporters. You see, the opponents think that it means a lot, while the law’s supporters are being very cautious. And, in...

Have you been following the news about Obamacare? The Affordable Care Act has receded from the front page, but information about how it’s going keeps coming in — and almost all the news is good. Indeed, health reform has been on a roll ever since March, when it became clear that enrollment would surpass expectations despite the teething problems of the federal website. What’s interesting about this success story is that it has been accompanied at every step by cries of impending disaster. At this point, by my reckoning, the enemies of health reform are 0 for 6. That is,...

Health Reform: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says critics of ObamaCare should cease and desist, because the law is "working." Given his track record on health care analysis, we'll politely ignore this advice. In 2011, the same Krugman declared the Veterans Health Administration was "a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform" because, among other things, "it's free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures." It turns out the VHA is more akin to a cesspool of bloated bureaucracy, mismanagement, deadly delays and cover-ups. A couple years...

Professor Paul Krugman is leaving Princeton. Is he leaving in disgrace? Not long, as these things go, before his departure was announced Krugman thoroughly was indicted and publicly eviscerated for intellectual dishonesty by Harvard’s Niall Ferguson in a hard-hitting three-part series in the Huffington Post, beginning here, and with a coda in Project Syndicate, all summarized at Forbes.com. Ferguson, on Krugman: Where I come from … we do not fear bullies. We despise them. And we do so because we understand that what motivates their bullying is a deep sense of insecurity. Unfortunately for Krugtron the Invincible, his ultimate nightmare...

If you ever have the strange desire to watch a couple of liberals devolve into an intellectual wasteland of platitudes and hypocrisy, just mention “Hobby Lobby”. During a recent TV special with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-People’s Republic of Massachusetts), Paul Krugman waded into the realm of idiocy (it was a short trip for him) while discussing corporate personhood, and the GOP’s desire to “push us back to 1894”. Of course, this raises a few questions: If corporations aren’t people, then why should we expect businesses to exercise “economic patriotism” in their tax dealings? I mean heck, I guess we shouldn’t...