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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Spending is not spending. The U.S. needs productive public investments, not wasteful spending. We need to modernize our infrastructure, retool our energy system, make our cities more resilient, and help to train a new productive labor force.
Overall, he does a fine job explaining things, which is what you would expect. He adopts a tone like the most sociable guy at a cocktail party (meaning, he's not Krugman, who's the argumentative one in the corner), trying to explain, but doing so in an easygoing way that won't scare anyone off.
Some pundits assert that in doing so he was taking his eye off the ball. We would argue quite the contrary. Putting jobs and wages in the direct line of sight is exactly what needs to be done to move the economy forward in a manner that benefits the middle class and average Americans.
Due to the number of baby boomers qualifying for Social Security and Medicare, spending will increase in coming decades as more members of the baby-boom generation become eligible for benefits and the health care cost for each enrollee increases.
It shouldn't be a secret by now: Consumers are unhappy. And it's not because we are too busy paying down our debts. It's really because no one in Washington has been focusing on job creation.
Seemingly, President Obama has moved off the deficit-hawk kick that marked his posture in 2010 when he appointed the Bowles-Simpson Commission, and 2011 when he agreed to a budget deal with massive cuts and automatic triggers adding up to about $4 trillion in deficit cuts over a decade. Seemingly, too, the corporate-led "Fix the Debt Campaign" -- millionaires and billionaires telling the rest of America to tighten its belt for the greater good -- isn't getting a great deal of traction. But despite the sheer unreality of their claims, the austerity lobby keeps winning by defining the terms of debate. Nearly everyone, right, center and left, is arguing about the economic recovery in terms of what the debt-to-GDP ratio should be in 2023. That is the wrong question. The right question is: how do we get a stronger recovery going now?
What Scarborough fails to note in this follow-up is that none of the people he mentions above are economists, much less economists even close to Krugman's stature.
John Kerry comes to the job with a long history of work on AIDS. So there are high hopes that he will pick up the ball where Secretary Clinton left off and help ramp up U.S. global AIDS efforts.
Nobel Prize-winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman spoke with MSNBC's Chris Hayes on January 27, 2013. In this clip, Krugman responds t...
Nobel Prize-winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman spoke with MSNBC's Chris Hayes on January 27, 2013. In this clip, Krugman gives his ...
To equitably reduce the deficit in a way that maintains good faith with the American people requires tax increases. Yes, new taxes are necessary. Especially those focused on the speculators who caused the crash.
As the Vatican learned with Galileo, the truth has a way of resurfacing. Be on the lookout for debt-free, interest-free money, coming soon to a country-needlessly-plunged-into-recession-by-austerity near you.
Paul Krugman is right: Japan is attempting a paradigm policy shift with potential systemic implications; and sustainability and success are not certain. The outcome, still too early to tell, will be consequential for Japanese society and the global economy as a whole.
Krugman cares deeply about unemployment and inequality, as did John Maynard Keynes before him. Yet like Keynes, Krugman seems caught in the inequality-free neoclassical paradigm.
Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. And that's why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change -- their cash brings both political parties to heel.
Has the culture of "retching across the aisle" introduced by the Tea Party so infected everyone else that they simply can't abide the idea of a "win-win" result?
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