Posted on 09/04/2010 6:34:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Next week, President Obama is scheduled to propose new measures to boost the economy. I hope they’re bold and substantive, since the Republicans will oppose him regardless — if he came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American. So he should put them on the spot for standing in the way of real action.
But let’s put politics aside and talk about what we’ve actually learned about economic policy over the past 20 months.
When Mr. Obama first proposed $800 billion in fiscal stimulus, there were two groups of critics. Both argued that unemployment would stay high — but for very different reasons.
One group — the group that got almost all the attention — declared that the stimulus was much too large, and would lead to disaster. If you were, say, reading The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages in early 2009, you would have been repeatedly informed that the Obama plan would lead to skyrocketing interest rates and soaring inflation.
The other group, which included yours truly, warned that the plan was much too small given the economic forecasts then available. As I pointed out in February 2009, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting a $2.9 trillion hole in the economy over the next two years; an $800 billion program, partly consisting of tax cuts that would have happened anyway, just wasn’t up to the task of filling that hole.
Critics in the second camp were particularly worried about what would happen this year, since the stimulus would have its maximum effect on growth in late 2009 then gradually fade out. Last year, many of us were already warning that the economy might stall in the second half of 2010.
So what actually happened? The administration’s optimistic forecast was wrong, but which group of pessimists was right
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Keynesianism has FAILED every time it has been tried. What a complete and utter fool !
The stimulus's didn't kill us (only maimed us), so lets now double the bet. That will surely do it this time.
Stuck on Stupid...
Insanity: Repeating the same action over and over again while expecting different results.
if he came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American.
What a laugh. What a true fool, what a true idiot this guy is.
I heard that Obama came out in favor of gay fathers — that was his gift to the nation for Father’s Day.
So this idiot Krugman thinks that throwing more money and spending more money is the solution to all problems?
Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars spent by the government — how could this ever cause any progress in the economy? How can this supposedly Nobel prize winner not understand that government spending doesn’t create businesses or inventions or computers or telephones or jobs — it just wastes money... and boy does he ever want to waste our money.
Did everyone read about the repair jobs on the highways —how the contractor breaks up the road every few miles, thereby blocking the highway for over 100 miles, because this is the way he can ensure that the government will finish the contract and he can get all this money for the job? This is the way people think when they’re playing with other people’s money.
Krugman is a fool. He just keeps saying the same thing over and over and over — spend more spend more spend more. Hasn’t he been listening to China? Hasn’t he been listening to anything anyone else says?
...how in the world did this laugh of an economist ever get the Nobel Prize? How in the world did this laugh, this joke of a thinker ever get such an exalted position at the New York Times? Don’t you get the feeling that they only hire racists, haters, fools, socialists, communists, and people who have never ever had a job in their entire lives?
The economy is staggering on with Zer0, Geithner, Summers, Pelosi and Reid in hot pursuit of gunning it down and tanning it’s hide.
It is ironic that countries like Germany and the UK are implementing fiscal austerity while we here in the USA are doing just the opposite.
Germany’s economy has started to move up and GDP rose at a very high level recently and their unemployment went down to the mod 7% level while we are stuck at close to 10%.
Krugman is of course not impressed.
He says :
“Oh, and don’t tell me that Germany proves that austerity, not stimulus, is the way to go. Germany actually did quite a lot of stimulus — the austerity is all in the future. Also, it never had a housing bubble that burst. And with all that, German G.D.P. is still further below its precrisis peak than American G.D.P. True, Germany has done better in terms of employment — but that’s because strong unions and government policy have prevented American-style mass layoffs.”
He then insists that scare stories about stimulus are wrong, and that stimulus works when it is applied. But it wasn’t applied on a sufficient scale. And we need another round.
academy = arrogant twerps pulling down inflated salaries for propagating clever-sounding ideas
reality = 17% of normal people unemployed or underemployed because of the above
If the stimulus went to the private sector instead of as payoffs to his buddies and to the unions, it probably would have worked.
He hasn't been wrong yet. It's just that most Americans are intellectually incapable of understanding the subltle neuance of recovey statistics.
Like the subtle nuance of global warming statistics? When the opposite of what you predict happens it proves your theory.
RE: If the stimulus went to the private sector instead of as payoffs to his buddies and to the unions, it probably would have worked.
I believe Paul Krugman might agree with you here.
It doesn't matter what he says ...
Krugman believes the answer is a double tap to the economy.
Krugman and those who think like him are so idiot-bound and ridden that no amount of God-given sanity could or would remove the idiocy from the idiots. =.=
Nonsense. As one example, any American with even a smattering of experience in business or investment or who paid attention in economics class knows that a "stimulus" plan which is really just a promise to spend money in the future will have little to no effect on the present economic condition. How would the amount of money being spent in the economy today be directly affected by the government funding projects in 2012? (And I mean directly, not some indirect effect of investors or business people changing their plans based on expectations of the future.)
It can't be, which is one reason the "stimulus" plan failed - because it wasn't even a real stimulus plan.
Maybe there's some kind of subtle code used by liberal elitists when they are talking, but I'd say even the cashier at Walmart understands just as much or more about what is really happening in the economy. Krugman's political ideas have long since overwhelmed his scientific thinking -- he's no longer testing to see if his ideas are correct, he's just promoting them.
GDP did go up, but understand why. It went up because government spending is automatically added when they calculate the GDP. If they increased government spending by a gazzillion, then you’d increase GDP by a gazzillion. But that doesn’t mean you’d be a gazzillion dollars richer. It’s all meaningless money. The question is what did you get for that gazzillion dollars? In the case of government, not much.
Was eating a bag of cracker jacks, and viola, tow, yes, two, nobel prizes inside, with a blank to fill in the name.
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