Some prominent left-wing commentators have devoted weekly columns and blogs to the notion that Great Britain has misguidedly pursued harsh spending “austerity” and that doing so has left the country lingering in unnecessary anguish. In the opinion pages of The New York Times, Paul Krugman inveighs that: Britain, in particular, was supposed to be a showcase for “expansionary austerity,” the notion that instead of increasing government spending to fight recessions, you should slash spending instead—and that this would lead to faster economic growth. Such invocations of the confidence fairy were …
Instead of the intellectual vandalism that typifies too much of Paul Krugman’s writing, it would be more useful if he returned to writing about economics…with facts. In a recent column he says: So if you really believed in the logic of free markets, you’d be all in favor of pollution taxes, right? Hahahahaha. Today’s American right doesn’t believe in externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right. What evidence does he use to support this cynicism? Krugman points to …
Proponents of government spending are fond of citing 1937 as an example of when government implemented sharp austerity, and the economy derailed. This argument is dead wrong. On Thursday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that fiscal austerity right now would make our economic crisis worse. “Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse,” writes Krugman. As his proof, he offers that “if the negotiations succeed, we will be set to replay the great mistake of …
Paul Krugman recently lamented the fact that in recent years, “manufacturing, once America’s greatest strength, seemed to be in terminal decline.” His analysis, though, misses the mark. He reached this conclusion because “in the 1990s, U.S. manufacturing employment was more or less steady. After 2000, however, it entered a steep decline. The 2001 recession hit industry hard, while the bubble-fueled expansion of the decade’s middle years — an expansion marked by a huge rise in the trade deficit — left manufacturing behind. By December 2007, there were 3.5 million fewer …
Many leftist journalists, bloggers, and talking heads are shamelessly exploiting last weekend’s tragedy in Tucson, Arizona. To them, there is a lesson to be learned in this senseless act of violence by an undeniably troubled man. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman says he was even “at some level, expecting something like this atrocity” to happen. Krugman concludes: “If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning.” This fear-inducing argument is a tired and worn-out Progressive prescription, …
In an op-ed from last week, Paul Krugman again called for greater government control of the economy to combat unemployment writing: “A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration — we’d be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure.” Well The Onion has some good news for Mr. Krugman, under the header Revamped WPA To Create 50,000 New Jobs By Disassembling, Reassembling Hoover Dam, they report: In an effort to boost …
In his Monday “Hey Small Spender” column, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman bizarrely denied that federal spending has significantly expanded over the past two years. He asserted that “[t]here never was a big expansion of government spending” and “the big government expansion everyone talks about never happened.” Yet for his talk about a “fact-free” disinformation campaign, Krugman curiously provides no data on total federal spending. This may be because all official budget data reveals a different story. According to President Obama’s own Office of Management and Budget—the keepers of …
Since 1985, the hands-down winner for worst marketing campaign has been New Coke—the disastrous flop when Coca-Cola tried to change its flavor. After 25 years, we have a new contender—President Obama’s “Summer of Recovery” slogan of 2010. The big media splash began in June, touting that “Obama, Biden declare ‘Recovery Summer,’” including six weeks of nationwide barnstorming visits by POTUS and VPOTUS. All summer, a hyper-active Recovery Blog on the White House website trumpeted what they wanted Americans to believe. Even the titles seemed to be lifted from works of …
Government workers probably aren’t overpaid, and even if they are, we shouldn’t care. This is Paul Krugman’s message in a recent blog post that takes on the critics of government pay. He is wrong on both counts. The Heritage Foundation has written extensively about public-private pay disparities, and we have found consistent evidence that government workers are overpaid, even after controlling for skill differences between the private and public sectors. Federal workers receive both wages and benefits above market levels. State and local workers receive sub-market wages, but they make …
The Obama administration and their Keynesian media allies are desperately pushing back against a growing consensus that President Barack Obama’s expansive and intrusive domestic agenda is to blame for high unemployment and the economy’s slow recovery. So in Paul Krugman’s Pity the Poor C.E.O.’s column today he asserts: So where’s the evidence that an antibusiness climate is depressing spending? The answer, supposedly, is that this is what you hear when you talk to entrepreneurs. But don’t believe it. Yes, when you talk to business people they complain about taxes, regulations …
