Not sure if you all read the Conscience of a Liberal, but Krugman is being driven to the brink of madness lately- he keeps getting things right yet no one is listening.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
It’s a doggy dog world.
Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.
Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.
American History and Black History can not be separated.
“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”
Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.
Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.
There’s always a light at the end of the frog.
I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.
Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?
If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.
Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.
You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.
Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.
Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.
The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.
The revolution will be supervised.
“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”
Peak wingnut was a lie.
One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.
No Justins, No Peace
We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.
One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.
We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.
You are here: Home / Krugman is Increasingly Shrill
Lupin
Back to reading Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama and William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream (esp. the 1930s part). Obviously no one else among our elites has.
Davis X. Machina
Here’s the Pecking Order of Public Life.
• Right, when everyone else was right, and in the same way as everyone else.
• Right, in the same way as everyone else, but late.
• Wrong, in the same way as everyone else, but when everyone else was wrong, too.
• Wrong in the same way as everyone else, and late.
• Wrong, but in the same way as it turns out everyone else was wrong later.
• Right, when everyone else was wrong,
• Right, but early, in a way that embarrasses people
• Right, when everyone else was wrong, and early.
Waynski
@John Cole: “The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right” Is that a new category or has it been around awhile and I hadn’t noticed? It’s awesome either way.
I guess being consistently right and brilliant in Washington is less important than being Dick Cheney’s daughter. Gov’ment fail.
WyldPiratd
It’s really too bad that Krugman isn’t quite shrill enough to state the glaringly obvious–that David Brooks is a double barrelled dumbass who is as full of shit as a Christmas goose.
Hunter Gathers
Krugman is going nuts because he knows he’s fighting a losing battle. White people are pissed off because the black janitor hasn’t been able to clean up the mess that Whitey left in a year and a half. So they are going to purposely vote for bat-shit crazy candidates to be put into power so they can impeach the Black POTUS for not being magic. They only thing that might save us from our own stupidity is increased minority turnout.
Black and Hispanic voters, I beg you – save us from ourselves.
ellaesther
Can I tell you what? It’s just this kind of realization — “he keeps getting things right yet no one is listening” — that makes me occasionally lose my shit and slip into the slough of despond (yes, I just referenced Pilgrim’s Progress on your ass. Deal).
Paul Krugman is not just some smart guy who keeps getting things right — he’s Paul Krugman. He’s got a hugely influential platform, national recognition inside and outside of academia as well as inside and outside of the Beltway, he’s got a Nobel Prize for the love of God — he’s even got a cameo in a recent Judd Apatow event! — and yet: No one is listening.
If Paul Krugman, with his brains, his writing skills, his knowledge, his diagnostic ability, and his rather remarkable cred can’t get anyone to listen — what they hell hope do I or anyone like me have of ever effecting any change, any where?
Excuse me, I hear my bed calling. I must go cover my head and sob.
GambitRF
Is there a way we can like body switch Paul Krugman and David Brooks a-la Face Off? That might be our best hope at this point.
http://nymag.com/news/media/67010/
Kryptik
Yep. Krugman’s just right in the wrong way, and everyone knows that just means he’s more wrong than the folks who were wrong, but in the right way. Oh, and if the Very Serious People believe it, then it’s obviously the truth.
Seriously, Paul, I think you know we’re fucked. Why fight it? The fix is in.
trollhattan
As they say, “that’s gonna leave a mark.”
Only it won’t because nobody will pay K-thug any mind on accounta he’s on the “wrong” side. That is, he’s on the side that’s actually concerned about how fiscal policy affects individuals, not just institutions.
rickstersherpa
David Brooks is basically soft selling Niall Ferguson. Feguson was on after Krugman on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show. And basically, it is all not quite madness, or rather there is a method to the madness. Ferguson and like minded elite conservatives see this as a “God” sent opportunity to dismantle the U.S. and Western European welfare states and lower the taxes on the accumulators of property. Ferguson is full on board Paul Ryan’s plan, which would not really change the deficit problem, but would gut social security and medicare, and of course cut the taxes for the rich (our old friend the “Flat tax”) and thereby release the “confidence fairy” upon the world.
Davis X. Machina
@Hunter Gathers: The official GOP 2010/12 campaign slogan — “Yeah, you can have white government back…. but it’s going to cost you.”
Urza
I’ve been working on a theory to describe how humanity has a massive tendency towards believing only whats least helpful to them. Doing things the hardest ways imaginable etc.
Unfortunately I think its a modern issue though. Because no way could we have gotten to this modern age if it was true through all periods of history. We might have ended up with iPads and smart phones through sheer momentum though because we certainly don’t seem to have much of the intelligence and creativity left from the 90s otherwise.
Crap, i’d just like to see a movie that isn’t a full on redo or blatant ripoff of something else.
Hunter Gathers
@Davis X. Machina: That cost is going to laid off cops, firefighters, and teachers. Along with reduced Medicare and Medicaid services, the shuttering of state government services, and increased poverty. But since these services are seen as existing for ‘them’ and ‘them’ alone, Whitey will win.
2010 – Whitey’s Revenge.
Zifnab
The bottom line is that David Brooks doesn’t give two shits about the economy. He and his conservative pals see this as the perfect opportunity to dismantle the entitlement system set up in the previous century.
They’re playing Jenga with the country because they think the bottom pillars look too socialist. Economics has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Paul Krugman is a very smart man, but you simply can’t outsmart this kind of stupid. Telling Brooks that his salary is intrinsically linked to the guy making $80k / year who buys Brook’s newspaper and watches Brook’s TV show, and convincing him that economic stimulus is the only thing keeping Brooks from losing HIS job, is a job just too monumental for Mr. Nobel in Economics.
Brooks just refuses to connect those dots.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Krugman needs to quit trying to decipher Brooks Babble. That way does lie madness. Brooks’s only mission in life these days is trying to find the right set of clothes for the next wingnut emperor. Nothing seems to fit other than the same old tattered threads. When nearly everything is wrong, it takes effort to not be right,
America only wakes up when the house is engulfed in flames. Unbelievably, we haven’t quite reached that point, and the wingnuts keep on trucking like illustrated by this new DNC ad. And saying one stupid thing after another, because they have nothing else to say but scream soshulist and firing full auto Tommy Guns in campaign ads. But they will pick up a fair number of seats this fall. Go figure.
Lupin
People who think being born white is a great achievement that deserves a lifetime of special treatment will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
low-tech cyclist
@Kryptik:
Because the consequences of losing this one, in terms of people’s actual lives and stuff, matter to him?
Just a WAG.
@ellaesther:
I was doing OK until a few days ago, but the reality started seriously sinking in over the long weekend: we’re not going to do anything about climate change, or 9.5% unemployment either.
I really haven’t felt this discouraged about our political system since the week after the 2004 election. I knew it meant that it would be at least 4 years before we started dealing with any of our country’s real problems.
When Obama won, I figured those 4 years were finally up.
Now all of a sudden, it looks like we’ve pretty much done what we’re going to do for the next few years, and it’s miles short of enough.
Zifnab
The bottom line is that David Brooks doesn’t give two shits about the economy. He and his conservative pals see this as the perfect opportunity to dismantle the entitlement system set up in the previous century.
They’re playing Jenga with the country because they think the bottom pillars look too soci alist. Economics has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Paul Krugman is a very smart man, but you simply can’t outsmart this kind of stupid. Telling Brooks that his salary is intrinsically linked to the guy making $80k / year who buys Brook’s newspaper and watches Brook’s TV show, and convincing him that economic stimulus is the only thing keeping Brooks from losing HIS job, is a job just too monumental for Mr. Nobel in Economics.
Brooks just refuses to connect those dots.
danimal
In a rational world, there’s plenty of room for a Grand Compromise–deficit spending now and deficit reduction (aka entitlement reform w/tax hikes) in the coming decade. I could sign on to that, depending on the details. Unfortunately, compromise requires a sane, sensible GOP, and I see absolutely no evidence that is possible. The GOP incentive structure is stuck on 100% obstruction and they can’t compromise even if they want to do so.
The only real solution to the problem is one that looks very unlikely: another crushing defeat for the GOP along with filibuster reform at the start of the new Senate term.
DougJ
It is America’s only hope. White, non-Latino voters, left unchecked, would certainly lead us to military dictatorship, sooner or later.
Comrade Kevin
@Waynski: You can click on the link for the category, and see all of the posts in it.
Brachiator
@ellaesther:
It’s sad. There are both liberals and conservatives who have written off the NY Times, liberals who deride it because it is not progressive enough, and conservatives who deride it because it doesn’t represent Sarah Palin’s Real America(tm). This makes it, sadly, easy for some to simply dismiss Krugman and never even consider his arguments. He writes for the Times, therefore he is obviously biased and so wrong.
I was looking at some of the comments to one of Krugman’s blog posts. The critics were stuck on the idea that if only Obama repealed health care reform and gave up all efforts of “intervening” in the economy, then bountiful jobs would erupt like a Gulf oil spill. Reality doesn’t matter to these people, only the lie that Republicans promise a free market cornucopia, as opposed to what they really offer, which are markets rigged in favor of their corporate buddies.
Hunter Gathers
@DougJ:
That ain’t no lie, brother.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
oops! forgot to link new DNC ad
El Cid
@rickstersherpa: Zactly.
Mark S.
Bobo:
I’m pretty sure the Fed has lowered interest rates about as low as they can possibly go and have been doing so for the last two years.
Krugman is actually being very restrained: Bobo is very clearly attacking him in this column, and doing it in a very bitchy manner (“These Demand Siders have very high I.Q.’s, but . . .”). It’s never fun to be attacked, but being attacked by an moronic dilettante like Bobo has to be galling.
RSR
I’ve been thinking about Cassandra for the past couple weeks or so, then this morning, I read this comment in a salon.com interview on a book about climate change/rising sea levels, but it applies across so many arenas lately:
via: http://www.salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/07/06/the_flooded_earth_interview
El Cid
@danimal: A good ‘Grand Compromise’ would be one in which ‘deficit hawks’ would be forced to recognize that there isn’t simply an expenditure side to deficits, but, and much more importantly, a revenue side.
It has been the collapse of federal and state and local revenues via the economic (including housing bubble) collapse and the Bush Jr. tax breaks for the very richest (and the idiotic estate tax elimination) which has caused most of the deficit and debt issues.
But these are cynical policymakers and hate-filled dupes who either don’t or pretend not to understand this so they can either carry out or cheer lead their greatest opportunity to attack New Deal / 1930s soshullist and reformist European governments / WWII era equality policies.
Not caring how your policies harm and undercut the people who form the great majority of the nations’ populations is class warfare.
PeakVT
@Urza: Remember: humans are smart; people are dumb. Which is to say that internal group dynamics often prevents humans from dealing with a rapidly changing reality.
El Cid
@Brachiator: I keep asking these people (in daily life) if businesses should halt any spending from borrowed funds to invest in tools and training and projects to expand revenue and profit and simply concentrate on trimming costs and living with stagnant or declining revenue.
JGabriel
David Brooks:
David, if the shoe fits, stop picking nits.
.
danimal
El Cid–I don’t disagree with you. This is a long-term, cynical game by people that don’t care about human suffering.
Davis X. Machina
It’s all a minimax problem to the Brookses, or more accurately, the people who own the Brookses. Someone like Niall Ferguson is pretty explicit on this…
Clearly you can screw the peasants too much — then they rise and cut your throats as you sleep. 1789 and 1917 actually happened. Les aristos really went a la lanterne.
But you can also give the peasants too much, and then they get uppity, and expect things, like this, of right, and not as a gift bestowed de haut en bas.
The question is, where do the curves cross — where help is cheap, the service is exquisite, but you don’t have to sleep with one eye open?
Napoleon
@rickstersherpa:
@Zifnab:
@El Cid:
You three have it right that this is all about the right seeing this as the great opportunity to sink the New Deal and Great Society reforms and programs.
Kryptik
@RSR:
I guess the only thing that we can really say at this point is ‘We’re All Cassandras now.’
El Cid
I don’t know if he’s being invited more, but I appreciate Krugman making himself available for so many more (I assume, just from memory) media discussions and interviews. I don’t know if it helps in any way but sanely representing reality in our national inane and ideologically stunted discourse in the billion dollar media.
El Cid
@Kryptik: And yet those screaming the most about deficits and debts and market confidence loss and inflation portray themselves as the beleaguered, silenced voices in the wilderness.
WereBear
We’re already there; cheap electronics is keeping this particular vessel from being boarded by folks with cutlasses in their teeth and nothing to lose.
Consider how your life would be right now without it:
*Higher education priced out of reach except for those studying for professions that lets them afford the debt slavery.
*Cheap food, but it’s crap and will create health problems and eventually kill you.
*You’re basically working to keep the car alive, because without the car you can’t work.
*If you have mass transit, you’re not able to get to the cheap food, and they suck you dry that way.
Now, in any other era, there would be coffee houses and plotting, because a) there’s nothing else to do, and b) there’s nothing else to do.
But in this era, you can watch TV and read and play games and socialize and complain online, and basically keep yourself amused and nurture the illusion of a point to your life.
It’s miserable, but it’s not f&cking miserable.
dj spellchecka
perhaps bobo thinks what happened in ’37 [or more recently, ireland] is “theory” rather than fact…
schrodinger's cat
I don’t know why anybody even takes Ferguson, an apologist for the British Empire, seriously when he talks about economics, he is a historian not an economist.
scav
well, I’m ready to voluntarily resign all Caucasoid affiliation on the principle that I’ve had some blood transfusions. Any chance it’ll fly? O, and Slavs didn’t count as good enough at one point, right?
Sly
All you need to know about Brooks vis-a-vis economics is that he had his initial hallelujah moment regarding the inherent beauty of self-regulated markets when he, at the ripe age of 22, lost rather badly in a public debate with Milton Friedman.
I’d give a non-essential organ for a video of the debate, simply because I imagine that Friedman offered up the same ridiculous claptrap that he used on the Phil Donahue Show in 1979 and Brooks (then a socialist because that’s how you got college chicks to fuck you back in those days) fell for it hook, line, and sinker. If he’s this intellectually vapid now, I can’t imagine what he was like with a bachelor’s degree freshly mounted on his wall.
paradox
Black and Hispanic voters, I beg you – save us from ourselves.
I forget where I saw it, I think it was Tapped, please excuse me, but apparently the Hispanic community is very impatient for results on immigration reform. What have they got so far? Nada.
The interesting element is that they have the same elaborate drinking games for Obama administration speeches that we had under Bush, they just plugged in different phrases. A lot of people got hammered after the President’s last immigration speech, obviously nothing is going to be done before the midterms.
[sigh] I don’t the Hispanics are very motivated.
Mark S.
@schrodinger’s cat:
Why does anyone take Bobo seriously, for that matter? What is he an expert on, the eating habits of people in red states vs. blue states? Yet I’ve seen him referred to as an intellectual on more than a few occasions. I guess all it takes to be an intellectual these days is an inch deep understanding of a few social sciences, as long as what you advocate coincides with the interests of the plutocracy.
El Cid
@Mark S.: The same outlook that thinks Thomas Friedman is an expert on foreign policy and on economics.
Sly
All you need to know about Brooks vis-a-vis economics is that he had his initial hallelujah moment regarding the inherent beauty of self-regulated markets when he, at the ripe age of 22, lost rather badly in a public debate with Milton Friedman.
I’d give a non-essential organ for a video of the debate, simply because I imagine that Friedman offered up the same ridiculous claptrap that he used on the Phil Donahue Show in 1979 and Brooks (then he was a word that starts with an social and ends with an ist…. FUWP) fell for it hook, line, and sinker. If he’s this intellectually vapid now, I can’t imagine what he was like with a bachelor’s degree freshly mounted on his wall.
Colin Laney
Stay away from the Greek princess. She’s bad news. And, whatever you do, don’t bring the horse inside the walls. It’s a trick.
Sly
All you need to know about Brooks vis-a-vis economics is that he had his initial hallelujah moment regarding the inherent beauty of self-regulated markets when he, at the ripe age of 22, lost rather badly in a public debate with Milton Friedman.
I’d give a non-essential organ for a video of the debate, simply because I imagine that Friedman offered up the same ridiculous claptrap that he used on the Phil Donahue Show in 1979 and Brooks (then he was a word that starts with a “social” and ends with an “ist”… FUWP) fell for it hook, line, and sinker. If he’s this intellectually vapid now, I can’t imagine what he was like with a bachelor’s degree freshly mounted on his wall.
Bill E Pilgrim
@rickstersherpa: We hear often that the extreme right (AKA currently as the GOP) wants to say that government is useless– then get elected to the majority, and prove it.
However they’ve now shown that they’re just as interested in proving it while the other side is in the majority. It’s really win-win for them, once they’ve become basically scorched earth campaigners. It’s just that they’re now scorching forward as well as backward.
This from Kevin Drum is the best demonstration I’ve seen recently, and the second most depressing thing I saw this week so far:
Mike E
@Zifnab:
Or, reason with narcissists.
Since they lack empathy, they can never cobble together a healthy world view, or worse, they are high-functioning sociopaths and you are just a game to them.
I’m just guessing, but Paul’s Nobel Prize is of little comfort to him at this point.
El Cid
Another priest helping the Catholic Church climb out from under of all its bad press.
sparky
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
on this point, i have come to agree with you. damn! ;)
the US can, apparently, tolerate a National Security State, massive structural inequality, endless foreign misadventures and the death of its manufacturing and infrastructure–for the moment, at least. i used to think the Empire would go out with a bang, but maybe it will be a whimper after all.
edit: whatever else one might say about him, David Brooks is not stupid: it takes a highly skilled mind and writer to produce such brilliantly shiny disingenuous work.
middlewest
20 fucking 10 and we’re still debating the crackpot supply-side cargo-cultists. It’s just as stupid as if we were still debating the age of the Earth or the theory of evolution… oh.
middlewest
@El Cid: Nevermind!
toujoursdan
Either James Howard Kunstler or Paul Krugman is right, but they aren’t both right. I tend to side with Kunstler, though I wish he was wrong.
frankdawg
I have gotten a small amount of shit on this site for being negative for predicting doom & for hoping for a swift apocalypse. Now, in a matter of just a few weeks I am reading many of you saying what I was saying months ago – we are fucked. Will we be fucked slowly & painfully or quickly and painfully?
Half-assed measures & bullshit bipartisanship will not save us so there seems to be very little we can do but watch & hope ‘I’ don’t take it too hard for too long.
If things go as bad as they appear to be headed I expect there will be violence and bloodshed. The teabaggers will be the first to start shooting because their conservative masters will not deliver relief as promised. But plenty of normal people will be pushed over the edge in some way. I assume they will pick easy targets, the poor, the brown, the ‘other’ and that will be sadder still.
Tone in DC
I can’t believe that Bobo has the gall to challenge Krugman (or anyone else who has gotten it right since 2006) to a debate or even a name calling match. If the last four years were test, Brooks would have gotten an F minus.
As for saving this country from itself, I hope someone can do it. What I see is not enouraging.
Zifnab
@WereBear:
Which is why the GOoPer complaint about poor people having cell phones and XBoxes and flat screen TVs is somewhat hilarious. The only thing keeping several million 20-somethings from rising up and gutting you all on fish hooks is the cheap electronics you deride them for using.
But I think it’s more than that, to be honest. I think the rich folks have found that the key to globalization is the ability to remove yourself, geographically, from those you repress. Manhattan is an island. In a way, so are the ‘burbs. The richest of the rich keep all their money in Switzerland and the Caymans. And that’s where they flee when shit hits the fan.
There’s no Bastille to burn anymore. You’d need a plane ticket to get to a respectable lynching. And god forbid you live out in the country. Then its 40 miles to anything, much less someone to punch in a fit of rage.
In the end, when we do finally decide to get mad, we’re just going to turn around and eat our own. :-p You can see it in Arizona and California and Texas, where the conservatives just scream “Colored People! Liberals did it!” And the middle class 50-something white people flood Walmart to rip all the guns off the walls. Like a pack of suckers.
El Cid
@middlewest: Try now.
jake the snake
Time for Naomi Klein to write a sequel.
“The Shock Doctrine
America, F*ck Yeah Edition”
sparky
@toujoursdan: who knows what Krugman really thinks? he may well think the enterprise is doomed, but the conventions of polite discourse prevent him from saying so in the Op-Ed pages. additionally, given the latest scalp-hunting on the Right, he’d have to be a fool to say anything inflammatory.
@frankdawg: yeah i had the same problem. funny how much the comments here often track the “conventional wisdom” after all. that said, the past is only prologue, not future.
@Zifnab: a-yup. of course, someone might come along and explain to us what “fair” means. hmmmm.
Napoleon
@middlewest:
That phrase sums up their theory perfectly.
El Cid
@middlewest: Someday the Solid Core Earthers will see the rightness of the Hollow Earthers if we just keep at it.
toujoursdan
@sparky:
There is probably a lot of truth to that, which is why I don’t expect Obama, et. al. to say what Kunstler writes.
roshan
I think we have a scapegoat now that the economy tanks just as Krugman says it will. Guess who it is? – who else Krugman himself!
WereBear
@Zifnab: Yes, great insight; must be why Dubai and the like is so sought after. It’s not just hermetic, it’s a bubble, too!
Thing of it is, without the masses keeping it afloat, their electronic digits that now means money becomes just so much etheric dark matter. They make their money, most of them, when people buy stuff.
Why, then, are they working hard to make sure people can’t afford to do that?
liberal
@ellaesther:
That doesn’t help much. I’m sure there’s got to be at least one right-wing Chicago school idiot economist who’s won the Nobel in econ who thinks we shouldn’t spend more now.
mattH
This has been my biggest complaint, in what’s probably it’s most amorphous application, to the Obama administration. Every time people ask why I’m so frustrated with this administration, I have to point out this. I agree it’s unfair to pin it on him, but who else had a chance to change it? Only the person who promised change, no matter how amorphous that was.
Dissolve the Senate. Not just filibuster reform but get rid of it. As representing population, Republicans haven’t been this low since before it became the home of the crazies. The relative homogenization of states and parties, coupled with a less federal relationship between state and federal government, and the lack of engagement and introspection by populaces means that this is a legislative body that can and does obstruct, but in a time when we can’t afford it.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
You must work for G’s company, because that’s exactly their grand business plan:
1. Lay off employees
2. ?
3. Profit!
Businesses really are convinced that the only thing they need to do in order to grow their business is cut budgets and lay off employees and new business will magically appear. It’s extremely bizarre.
catclub
@Hunter Gathers:
“It is America’s only hope. White, non-Latino voters, left unchecked, would certainly lead us to military dictatorship, sooner or later. ”
Um, they did not lead us to military dictatorship in the thirties, when other places with huge unemployment were going that way. Also, given the number or African and Latin American dictatorships, the evidence is not really there for
claiming a distinct non-crazy ethnic brand.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Zifnab: Yeah I think it’s more likely to be like Japan’s lost decade of depression than like Somalia or Mad Max. And of course, who really knows but that would be my guess.
Bill H
I’m sure Krugman is right, Brooks full of shit, and that we should be doing more stimulus. That being said, Krugman’s logic leaves something to be desired.
Saying that something did not work is hardly confirmation that it would have worked if it had been bigger. Krugman tends to do this sort of thing. He makes arguments that sound good on the face of them, but which are actually not really logical. He’s saying that he can prove stimulus works, and his proof is, here, nothing more than that he said before that what was being done was not big enough. While that refutes Brooks saying that stimulus does not work, it does not actually prove that it does; “had it been bigger it would have worked” is still only a theory.
Krugman has made other arguments to “prove” his theories, but some of them are similarly weak. I don’t disagree with him, and will not argue against more stimulus spending, but that does not mean that I regard every word that Krugman utters as being infallible.
Joel
does this make David Brooks the modern Clytemnestra? Aegysthus?
liberal
@WereBear:
Yes, but I’m pretty sure the last time things were so bad that truly massive social unrest threatened was the Great Depression. And I could be wrong, but I’d wager that lots of people actually starved to death in the GD (as in, couldn’t get minimum required calories).
Brien Jackson
@Bill H:
No, that’s not really true. The point is that it did work, it just wasn’t big enough to make things sufficiently better. Sort of like if I need to get $2,000 to pay a bill; getting $1,000 leaves me better off than I was, but it’s not enough to cover the gap entirely.
schrodinger's cat
@Mark S.: Bobo is an idiot, I avoid reading him as far as possible.
Rick Taylor
@Bill H:
There’s a limit to what he can do in a short popular column in a paper. I tend to trust him (and people like Brad De Long), not able to follow the evidence for myself. He did say from the beginning the stimulus while definitely positive would not be enough to bring us out of stagnation.
__
He was also writing about the housing crash well before it happened (which is why I wasn’t surprised and asked my friends to be careful about variable rate mortgages). Not that that one should have been hard to foresee; and of course he didn’t foresee the scale of the crises that followed.
slag
@middlewest:
And people still believe in ghosts and are afraid of black cats and broken mirrors…
Truth is, we don’t think so good a lot of the time.
I’m sure people like David Brooks have a college degree or two under their belts, so our current system of formal education obviously isn’t the silver bullet solution. When someone’s insipid and irrational ideology is enabled and even encouraged by his social sphere, no amount of evidence will undermine it. It just is.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Bill H: Krugman isn’t basing that on his own statements or logic, he’s basing it on economic history and theory.
Which you may disagree with, of course, but trying to refute an entire school of thought about what to do and not do during a severe financial crisis based on some supposed faulty logic in one paragraph is another thing entirely.
He’s not saying that the government should spend money during a crisis because the prior stimulus worked or didn’t work, he’s saying that the government should spend money massively during the crisis because they’re the only ones who possibly can. Everyone else is driven by self-interest, which leads to pulling back. Because it’s actually logical to do so. It’s just that it’s also fatal for the whole. That’s what governments are for.
Davis X. Machina
They’re working hard to make sure people almost can’t afford to do that, and overshot.
Optimum relative immiseration — cheap help, and grateful help. A paradise for BoBos, in other words.
Absolute immiseration — tumbrels.
It’s an interesting problem.
WereBear
@liberal: That’s part of my point; actually starving will impel a person to take up the Rusty Pitchforks.
Cheap tasty crap doesn’t not have the same impetus. And by the time one realizes it, they are old & sick & their best pitchfork days are behind them.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
I don’t think that’s a productive line of argument. Aside from harboring a logical fallacy (appeal to authority), it gives credence to that whiney douchebag econ PhD at the Fed who said IIRC that bloggers et al. don’t know enough to debate economics.
I would have thought that the fact that economists as a general rule didn’t see a $8T housing bubble for what it was shows that the field is intellectually bankrupt. It doesn’t have to be; I do think there’s a truly valuable positive economic science. But the whores who practice it shouldn’t be trusted.
JGabriel
Cialis! EPU’d: reposted in next thread. Don’t release from moderation. Cialis!
p.a.
you’ll never get anywhere in this country talking sense. if someone could mind-control rush to declare shoelaces are actually forks and spoons conservative nation would starve to death.
liberal
@WereBear:
But people will never actually starve here (short of a cataclysm). Aside from the fact that supporting
corporate agribusinessthe family farmer leads to cheap food, the ruling elites understand that and will keep most people fed, since food is cheap enough with modern tech to do that without taking too much from their privileges.[edit: sorry, maybe you know and are saying this…don’t have enough time to parse again]
Jennifer
Shrilly Krugman, doesn’t he know that in America, we only do the smart thing when all other options have been exhausted?
Bill E Pilgrim
@JGabriel: I don’t think it’s called the Internet anymore. I think that was what it was formerly known as.
liberal
@Rick Taylor:
Ugh.
DeLong is a douchebag for many reasons, among them:
(1) He deletes non-offensive comments that he disagrees with (both on the left and the right);
(2) he said too many kind words about Alan Greenspan for too long.
Mnemosyne
@Bill H:
I don’t think that’s what Krugman is saying. What he’s saying is that even the relatively small stimulus that we did get worked pretty well (and we have the numbers to prove it) so, in his opinion, a bigger stimulus would have worked even better.
When Brooks says the stimulus “didn’t work,” he’s completely wrong and Krugman is right. You can debate whether or not Krugman is also right that a bigger stimulus would have worked even better, but it’s still pretty plain that Brooks is wrong when he says the stimulus didn’t do anything and Krugman is right when it says that it did.
WereBear
@liberal: I guess I’m confused; you previously pointed out people did starve during the Great Depression.
My point is that people are being starved while buying and eating food; it’s a neat trick of the Factory Farms, and few people realize it.
Jager
I’ve been in management for 30 plus years, I’ve watched and helped, two self made, lower class guys become “elites”. Both have fortunes in the 500 plus million dollar range. The first was educated via the GI Bill after WW2, the 2nd benefited from the push for education in the 50’s and all the money poured into the state run colleges and Universities in the 60’s. As they became wealthy, they forgot their backgrounds and roots. The first indication came when the “son of poor immigrants” (a story he loves to tell) cancelled his companie’s platinum level health plan the day he and his wife qualified for Medicare. The 2nd had a great health plan for his organization for one reason, his son needed it. The son was on our payroll, had an office but seldow showed up, but he had great healthcare!
Early on, both of these guys pumped money into their companies, created great products and were at the top of their field. They paid well, were fair and equitable employers, they hired and promoted talent. The more money they made, the concern for the employees and their welfare diminished. It got to the point, the “son of poor immigrants” was bitching about how the “those lazy bastards are picking my pocket” and he was talking about the lowest paid of our employees. My wife and I were having dinner with him and his wife one night. I had just bought a new car and he looked across the table at me and said “you know, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have that shiny new car!” I had worked for that bastard for 12 years, I ran a divison of his company with a 27% increase in revenue the previous year and he is giving me digs for buying a car I’d been dreaming about for years. I quit a couple of months later and started my own business.
The 2 of them and people like them, really don’t give a shit. They won’t pay any price at all in a bad economy, because as my old boss used to say, “I’ve got plenty of money tucked away in a safe place” wink, fucking wink.
cleek
@Mnemosyne:
it’s not so bizarre. when productivity is rising, you don’t need so many people to do the same amount of work.
as long as they’re not laying off their own customers, why should they care if a bunch of people are suddenly not spending any more ?
Shinobi
Can we like… Go Paul Krugman? And start a colony with people who believe it is important to base your ideas on actual fact? And then fund public projects and employ people and not just let them starve because we realize that the entire basis of our current economy is services and consumption which people without money cannot actually participate in? Then actually have a productive economy again sometime in the next 10 years?
Reading his column and then seeing what our leaders are actually doing is slowly crushing my soul.
If someone could tell me what I could do to get them to actually do something that would actually help, I would do it. I can barely even bring myself to keep up on current events lately, I am not one of those people who enjoys watching car accidents in progress.
Jennifer
@Bill H: You don’t have to take Krugman’s word for it; all you have to do is apply your own common sense to a real-life situation.
To wit: suppose 10% of the people in your city are unemployed. Without unemployment benefits, they would have no money to spend on anything, which would lead in short order to 10% less spending at gas stations, grocery stores, WallyWorld, for rent or mortgage payments, etc etc.
Ok…so: the gas stations, grocery stores, WallyWorld etc are all seeing a revenue drop of 10%. How are they going to cover that while still remaining afloat? Well, they’ll cut back inventory a bit – this will lead to some supplier upstream seeing his revenues drop; he’ll cover this in part by buying less raw material, and the producers of the raw material will see some of their revenue drop.
But just cutting back on inventories won’t cover the gap. All of these businesses will soon find that they now have a larger labor force than they need to meet the newly lower demand. And so they, too, will lay off workers. Now, instead of having 10% unemployment, your city has 12% unemployment. And all of the businesses who already saw demand fall by 10% will experience another drop in demand correlating to the new, higher unemployment number.
And so on and so forth, until no one can buy anything, no one is making anything, and no one is working.
This stuff is actually quite elementary. You don’t have to take Krugman’s word for it; you just have to think about it a little bit.
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: I don’t mean that economists are infallible, there are a lot of problems with economics as a discipline. I was just pointing out that Niall Ferguson is no authority on that topic, that’s all.
El Cid
@Bill H: It’s not confirmation of whether or not greater federal investment in the economy would have had a strongly more reparative effect, it’s a continuation of repeating evidence-based financial calculations that investment (“stimulus”) backers like Krugman and Baker et al recommended in the first place.
These economists didn’t just say, prior to the stimulus or after the stimulus, ‘it should be bigger’. They calculated the amount of lost economic activity and employment / wealth, and recommended federal intervention in proportion to the disappeared amount.
Dean Baker:
Somebody may not be convinced, and there certainly is no opportunity to go back in time and actually test the counter-factual, but those who point out that their calculations indicate the actual stimulus was inadequate economically (politically is an important but different matter) to the needed goals have a pretty logical and prior basis for their arguments.
bago
From a rhetorical perspective, A Return to Reagan’s Rates position might be unstoppable in the beltway.
Mnemosyne
@cleek:
It is bizarre, actually, because they’re paying out more money in overtime than they would if they hired an additional person. Right now, his guys are working 12-hour-plus shifts almost every day, at least 6 days a week, and the company is spending more to cover that time and a half (sometimes reaching into doubletime) than they would if they got another hourly person to cover the extra hours.
Sure, you can tout your company’s amazing productivity by having people work from 9 am until 10 pm every day, but there is no actual cost savings involved in doing it that way. In fact, it’s more expensive. And yet they refuse to hire an additional person because it would increase their headcount, which is taboo even if it saves the company money.
That’s what’s bizarre.
(His company delivers medication and medical supplies to people at home, so there’s only so much efficiency that computerization and automation gets them. At some point, someone has to put on their shoes and go out to make deliveries, and that’s where the majority of the overtime is coming from.)
Davis X. Machina
@bago: No, although it posits an interesting choice — St. Ronnie v. greed — the Vegas smart money is all on greed. Under those circumstances, St. Ronnie goes to the wall in a heartbeat.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat:
IIRC he made his name on something involving monetary history.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about.
liberal
@El Cid:
The amazing thing is that Krugman predicted that the administration’s stim package wouldn’t be large enough, that people would point to continuing high employment as evidence it hadn’t worked at all (though I’m sure Krugman would agree it had “worked” insofar as it did save jobs, just not as many as a full stimulus would have), and that as a result they wouldn’t get another chance. Which is exactly what unfolded.
liberal
@Mnemosyne:
Maybe; you have to figure in the costs of training the new hire, and the costs of laying people off in the future if it turns out you have too many.
cleek
@Mnemosyne:
from my link :
hours are falling, overall. but people are working harder.
schrodinger's cat
@liberal: May be, I just can’t take someone who is an apologist for the British Empire, seriously. The British Empire was so wonderful that we are still unraveling the effects of its winding down more than 60 years after the fact. Case in point, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan and so on..
pablo
Yes, but if he were wrong, this would happen.
Elizabelle
David Brooks is a prime example of Upton Sinclair’s maxim, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on his not understanding.”
You can see Brooks observe an issue fairly carefully (he’s never first on the scene, but follows trends and pop culture), analyze the problem from his affluent, well-educated perspective, and then reel away from a real world or empirically-tested conclusion.
Brooks’ forte is writing columns that are thoughtful for the first half or 2/3, but then veer away into Republican or conservative dogma as he realizes where his argument is leading him. Back to the shallows of shallow thinking, time and time again. He gives cover to those who would rather “believe” than understand or empathize. Or act.
He cannot square what he sees with what he “knows” and while he’d still have a job at the New York Times, even if he wised up, perhaps his psyche could not take how blindingly obtuse he has been. In print. For years. For lots of $$$$, but still wrong.
The pity is, he’s likely more influential than shrill Mr. Krugman.
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
I’ve seen the numbers. They would save money by hiring an extra person (or, you know, hiring back the person they laid off because they were totally sure they didn’t need him even though overtime costs skyrocketed after he was gone), but it’s completely out of the question. Right now, G’s just trying to get permission to get a per diem (ie not a real employee, not full-time, no bennies required) to take up the slack and even that is like pulling teeth despite the cost savings.
@cleek:
Any idea how many of those falling hours are “Walmart hours,” as in they make you clock out and work unpaid overtime? Sure, it’s illegal … if someone complains and the company gets caught. But a lot of companies are willing to risk it.
HRA
I have no clue why I am driven to give my 2 cents worth her on this topic – well maybe I do have a clue or two.
What happens to those who do not get unemployment insurance? Unless they have a 2nd check coming in (wife, husband, etc. ) they go on welfare. Another scenario is they would be working under the table if they have the right connections or advantages. Some of them do it anyway no matter what government program they are collecting from.
I have to admit I am unable to understand all this hand wringing over the economy being constantly focused on in the negative by the media to where we end up with the fear shown here and in other places. When the need arises for buying goods, the customers will be there if the business offers the goods that will sell.
licensed to kill time
__
Question Authority used to be a popular button back in the 60’s. That, and Be Peculiar.
edit:more proof that us DFH’s were right.
cat48
I think they will approve unemployment when the Senate gets back & WV Senator is seated. Obama did hit Repugs on this when he was in MN last wk & in his Sat. “radio” address. He is going out thur & fri this wk so hopefully he will bring it up again then. Reid thinks UI will pass when WV is seated as the Maine girls voted for it. The harder part is the state employee part stimulus which is desperately needed. The House raided the Race to the Top program for that & O is threatening to veto that so I don’t know about that part. Wish we could have a payroll tax holiday. That & UI give the economy a huge boost according to an econ chart I read. Don’t know if legislation is req for that or not.
gypsy howell
It is bizarre, actually, because they’re paying out more money in overtime than they would if they hired an additional person.
Howlin Wolfe
@ellaesther: Ellaesther wins the internets 2day!
Lurker
@Mnemosyne:
Does this company provide health insurance?
If so, the cost of health insurance for an additional employee could make the company gunshy about new hires.
Lurker
@Mnemosyne:
Does this company provide health insurance?
If so, the cost of health insurance for an additional employee could make the company gunshy about new hires.
Corner Stone
There is nothing I enjoy more than some real tough rightwing badasses in the WH.
Isn’t this the same argument as unemployment checks make people lazy, or McCain saying he’d get the Sunnis and Shiites in a room and tell them to “Stop the bullshit.”?
From Krugman’s:
Confidence Fairies Have Infiltrated The White House
jwb
@Elizabelle: “He cannot square what he sees with what he “knows” and while he’d still have a job at the New York Times, even if he wised up, perhaps his psyche could not take how blindingly obtuse he has been.”
I’m not sure about this, actually, because if Bobo didn’t represent the “voice of thoughtful conservatism” (not that that is what he does, but that’s what he represents) would the NY Times employ him? That is, the NY Times employs him to be a “thoughtful conservative,” and I’m not sure the Times would continue to employ him if he could no longer plausibly call himself a conservative—the “thoughtful” part is more expendable than the “conservative” part, which is why the “thoughtful” part so often goes missing.
Calming Influence
Krugman should walk down the hallway to Brook’s office and give him a noogie.
jwb
@Corner Stone: Yes, that post was a particularly depressing post. I would love to know who Stephanopoulos was talking with.
Mnemosyne
@Lurker:
A per diem employee doesn’t get healthcare or other benefits since they’re only used on an as-needed basis (usually for 4-6 hours a day, max). And he can’t even get one of those because OMG THE HEADCOUNT! THE HEADCOUNT!
Mnemosyne
@gypsy howell:
Yes to the medical premium, no to the vacation time. Most of these guys have a minimum of 4 weeks vacation available because they’ve been there for at least 10 years. G has about 3 months since he’s been there for 15 years.
MikeBoyScout
Don’t want to overly depress y’all or myself, but there’s a greater than 60% chance we are all F**Ked.
Krugman is shrill because it seems so hopeless.
Nobel Prize winning Economist writing in the paper of record , and VSP BoBo writes some outrageous crap and it gets published in the same paper.
Sure, you know what needs to be done, but we are less than 5% of the folks, and we account for 0% of the VSP.
Dooooooomed I say!
jwb
@MikeBoyScout: “Don’t want to overly depress y’all or myself, but there’s a greater than 60% chance we are all F**Ked.”
Only a 60% chance? You are an optimist.
gogol's wife
On Krugman’s own blog, there is still only one comment on this post. Maybe some of you should go over there and lend him some support. (Me, I’ve given up on commenting.)
HeartlandLiberal
Krugman is not shrill.
Krugman has been right. Krugman is right.
The idiots running the show in Washington are wrong.
The financial masters of the universe cannot bring themselves to admit to the massive mess they have created.
When you create an alternate reality, when the wealth is all a chimera based on a bubble and speculation and criminal activities by everyone from mortgage bankers to fund managers to derivative managers, and it all is crashing down around you, it is hard to admit what total, clueless, criminal idiots you have been.
That’s all.
P.S. Did I mention Krugman has been right, and probably is right on this?
El Cid
@gogol’s wife: Comments on Krugman’s blog posts are reviewed before they are posted, so there could be dozens or hundreds of comments waiting. I know mine is.
Bill H
Well, there are some very strange arguments going on here. One person is talking about unemployment compensation, another says the economy would be worse if the too-small stimulus had not happened, which is mostly conjecture because no one has offered any real proof of that, and yet another says the the government should spend because “it’s the only one that can, that’s what governments are for.” I might buy any number of arguments, but that the purpose of the government is to spend money is a little too far out for me. Even the basic argument that the economy depends on (consumer) spending is a little tenuous, which I’m sure will get me flamed no end. An economy that consumes more than it produces strikes me as a failure waiting to happen. I seem to be in small company with that idea, but…
What it all boils down to is “don’t tell me that Paul Krugman has ever uttered anything less than Oracle-like truth.” A lot of the discussion consists of claiming that things are true merely because Paul Krugman says so. He is not a god, he is simply a man with theories.
El Cid
@MikeBoyScout: I guess I better begin stocking up on colloidal silver and MRE’s and posters of John Wayne.
El Cid
@Bill H:
I don’t understand why logically justified policies enacted by legislation are “too far out”, but spending money is a tool of government — our representatives up there — and it’s certainly something which has been done for all sorts of reasons.
Although, looking at the Constitution, it’s pretty clear that one of the purposes of government is in fact to spend money, given the revenue-raising and budgetary role of Congress enumerated within.
Have you reasons to dispute the pretty simple numbers with which I presented you from Dean Baker? Is there somehow something which confuses you about an economy largely driven by consumer purchases (including residential housing construction) which undergoes dangerous contraction when that consumer demand falls away? Is there something confusing about a government using funds to act as a replacement for consumer demand so as to not have the population hurt much more?
These debates took place around the New Deal, and it’s pretty clear that massive public spending then and even more intensely during WWII brought the economy out of devastation and public employment (including military service) provided income to millions who would otherwise have been jobless.
At this point you seem to just be ignoring logical arguments presented to you by saying ‘Well you haven’t proven anything’ on topics with which you cannot retroactively test a counterfactual.
We don’t know that Iraq wouldn’t have fallen apart at the very same time Bush Jr. and his liberal hawk cheerleaders led us to blow that nation to smithereens, but there are pretty strong arguments that it wouldn’t have.
Ruckus
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
America only wakes up when the house is engulfed in flames. Nice.
But I think a better analogy right now is: The roof has collapsed from dry rot and we had the fire dept pour water on to keep it from catching fire. So now we are taking bids on what color to paint the house.
Glidwrith
@Mnemosyne: As far as hiring an additional body is concerned, there is also the lovely little trap of being salaried. Once you’re salaried they can work you as many hours as they want, which means no overtime. It’s far easier for a company to “salary” someone and get undocumented hours out of them rather than hire on another warm body.
mattH
@Bill H:
Theories that on this and related matters have been frustratingly correct. If he had been wrong, or the theories had been disproven before now, I’d agree with you, but we’ve had 60 years for someone to come up with a non-Keynsian theoretical approach and nothing better has been presented. Go with what works, especially when it’s as textbook as this.
geg6
@toujoursdan:
I’d say the likelihood that a science fiction author (who has a book on this very subject to shill) is more right about the economy than a Nobel Prize winning economist/academic is probably rather low.
Krugman is, as he always seems to be, absolutely correct. But he’s a DFH, just like me, so he can suck it.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Businesses really are convinced that the only thing they need to do in order to grow their business is cut budgets and lay off employees and new business will magically appear. It’s extremely bizarre.
Why is it so bizarre when controlling costs = profits is what is taught in biz school. And what is usually the largest cost in a biz? Employees. Less profits? Cut costs (employees). More profit. Actually to be fair they teach cutting overhead. Make things as cheap as possible, sell for as much as possible. Wal Mart is a success, therefore the biz model is correct, therefore lower overhead = profit. No matter that it destroys the country by costing out local mfg. No matter that it sets the local wage structure too low. It’s the same logic that says war pays, the lives are just the cost of doing biz. And if cutting costs is the holy grail then government must do the same thing. Cut out all the unnecessary spending. If I don’t need SS then why do we have it. If I don’t need public health care then why do we have it. And so on and on and on. But as in a lot of things it has an element of truth. If you don’t look too deep or plan too far in the future. Cause if you do you know it’s bullshit. On is supposed to make a profit by doing better, not worse.
But the boomers are the nuclear generation, everything is short term and we don’t know what is around the corner. We have to get what we can when we can and hold on tight because we fear that bright light in the morning may not be the sun. Rational? I’m one of them and I don’t think so, but do you have a better explanation?
Mnemosyne
@Bill H:
You mean other than the link I provided you of multiple economists saying the stimulus worked? Or are you saying that since there’s no way of knowing what might have happened without the stimulus, we can’t point to the statistics that show the stimulus worked because for all we know Jesus would have intervened and fed us all on loaves and fishes if the stimulus had never passed?
Sorry, but you’ve gotten to a silly point when you dismiss existing statistics about what actually happened with the argument that something else might have happened if we had just waited it out. It’s like the claim about the Great Depression that it totally would have fixed itself if Roosevelt hadn’t intervened. Sure it’s unprovable, but can you prove it wouldn’t have happened? QED.
It’s not debatable whether or not the stimulus helped. Only idiots with no economics skill like Brooks are still riding that pony. The debatable point is how much additional stimulus would have increased that benefit.
Bourbaki
@Bill H:
I’m suprised no one (considering it is literally within the first three paragraphs) actually pointed out that what Krugman is (mostly) responding to is this claim in the Brooks Op-Ed :
To which Krugman responds :
Or to spell it out slowly for you, Brooks claims pro-stimulus people have no explanation for why unemployment is high and Krugman (again slowly) explains that they in fact do have an explanation and have had one from the beginning…There wasn’t enough stimulus.
Now one can certainly argue about whether this is a valid explanation or not but that is not the point.
El Cid
@Ruckus:
Although Wal-Mart has always focused on cruelly cutting the costs of employees and consumer safety, to bring it back to the parallel with government investment in the economy, Wal-Mart injects enormous amounts of revenue into expansion, rebuilding, advertising, technological development, lobbying the Chinese government, etc. It’s not like they’re cutting their nose off to spite their face. So even when they’re cutting costs, however cruelly, they’re willing to invest in the things they care about when it might bring them future revenues and profits.
Zifnab
@Jennifer: It’s not just that, though. We spent the last 10 years in a “jobless recovery” with something of the exact opposite happening. Individuals went into increasing amounts of debt to maintain their lifestyles and pumped more money into the economy. So the retailers purchased more inventory to meet the demand. And the raw materials guys bought more materials to meet their new demand.
But when it came time to hire, all the jobs got shipped overseas because they were cheaper. And the managers of the raw materials companies and the design companies and the retail companies all pocketed the difference.
So you had debt rising and rising, while the only people seeing their wages increase were the folks running the businesses. Domestic jobs and salaries stagnated, prices remained fairly static, and the managers reacted to stagnation by trying to cut more corners. They couldn’t stop ordering raw materials or building products, but they COULD ship more jobs overseas.
By 2007, we had economists all shrugging their shoulders and suggesting we were converting to a service economy, where everyone would just get jobs as bankers or burger flippers. And then the banking industry burst.
It’s not enough to simply plow money into the economy. You’ve got to have a degree of job retention. Unemployment benefits can only go so far to help the economy if we aren’t creating jobs with our increased spending. Otherwise, we’re just handing jobless benefits to $1 / day Chinese laborers and their billion dollar bosses.
fucen tarmal
ah the unintentional template generated gallows humor that conceals a truth.
“timespeoplerecommend: punishing the unemployed”
fucen tarmal
ah the unintentional template generated gallows humor that conceals a truth.
“timespeoplerecommend: punishing the unemployed”
Mnemosyne
@HeartlandLiberal:
Psst. Insider tip. Calling someone “shrill” is a compliment around here.
ksmiami
Andy Grove had a great article about the importance to retaining jobs here even if it costs a little more because at least we aren’t selling tomorrow’s economy down the river… Today’s entry level job could launch tomorrow’s future products… I think it would be great if policy punished job exporters. The race to globalization is a race to the bottom.
Stefan
Saying that something did not work is hardly confirmation that it would have worked if it had been bigger.
Saying that the fire did not go out because you did not pour enough water on it is hardly confirmation that the fire would have gone out if only you’d poured on more water….except, you know, it kind of is.
Stefan
that the purpose of the government is to spend money is a little too far out for me
This is one of the most basic functions of government there is. In fact, it’s pretty much the most basic function, because government can’t really do much of anything without spending money. If that concept is “far out” for you, then you plainly don’t understand a thing about how government works.
Stefan
It is bizarre, actually, because they’re paying out more money in overtime than they would if they hired an additional person. Right now, his guys are working 12-hour-plus shifts almost every day, at least 6 days a week, and the company is spending more to cover that time and a half (sometimes reaching into doubletime) than they would if they got another hourly person to cover the extra hours.
You’re forgetting benefits. For most companies it’s cheaper to pay massive overtime to one employee than it is to hire two employees and cover their healthcare and other benefits (pensions if they still exist, etc.). The fact that we have employer-dependent benefits rather than a universal government-backed healthcare and pension system is a huge drag on employment.
300baud
@Bill H:
Krugman has explained this pretty well in other articles. The symptoms of too much fiscal stimulus include wage inflation, price inflation, and difficulty filling jobs. None of those is true. So as long as you accept basic macroeconomics, Krugman’s point is perfectly logical.
Ruckus
@El Cid:
You are correct sir.
That’s the point of the biz schools. It’s not wrong to spend money as long as it makes more money for you. It’s wrong to take the long view and make it better for others as well.
asiangrrlMN
@ellaesther: I have kinda lived in that place all my life. After the election of Obama, I was briefly jazzed and energized that maybe we as a collective can make a difference. Now, I am back to the “No we can’t” place again. Feh.
Ruckus
@ksmiami:
I think Andy Grove’s point is that the world has, over centuries, gotten much more accessible to vastly more people. The problem is recognizing and exploiting globalization because there is a profit to be made, and not recognizing nor caring that this can easily screw a countries economy up. For years. Once again short term thinking is exactly the wrong ideal. I wonder if it is because this country is actually fairly young as countries go and has come a long ways in that short time?
jwb
@asiangrrlMN: I’m afraid we’re going to be needing your rusty pitchforks before this is over.
Ruckus
@jwb:
She may need to make them rusty pitchforks in 50 caliber to be effective enough.
liberal
@Bill H:
Flat false. We say Krugman is correct because we think he has the better side of the argument.
Krugman has certainly been wrong in the past. For example, he was wrong to say that speculation in the derivatives markets couldn’t have juiced oil prices. (Traditionally, that would be correct, but apparently now the spot price of oil is actually directly influenced by futures prices.) When he advocated a Swedish-style bailout of the banks, he included the plank of making bondholders whole, which I think is a bad idea.
So if you think that we (or at least I) quote Krugman because we believe everything he says, you’re wrong.
ellaesther
@asiangrrlMN: @Howlin Wolfe: and @liberal & @Brachiator & @low-tech cyclist
Wow, you leave one despairing comment and walk away, and lo! The world despairs with you.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, rather than consider the muck and the mire, I wound up writing about Ringo Starr’s 70th (!!) birthday today, concluding that to the extent that any of us thinks that we can do anything in the world, it is in no small part because of the Beatles. So – Krugman? Despair. Starr? Hope-ish. For whatever that’s worth. http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/cake-and-candles-for-richard-starkey/
(And thank you, Howlin Wolfe, for the award. I will accept it wrapped in my blanket and holding my teddy bear…).