In the last year or so, President Obama failed to come up with a stimulus plan super-ultra-plus-sized enough to meet the wishes of Paul Krugman. Perhaps to compensate for his grief, the New York Times’ star economist appears to be have begun channeling some of the most influential films of the late 1960s. Last year, it was 1970′s Patton and Tora, Tora, Tora:
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, steps into the WABAC machine and guides us through some truly improbable history:
Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.
AdvertisementThe president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938–instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.
What Krugman calls “the miracle of the 1940s” is more commonly known as World War II, a ruinous conflict that cost some 60 million lives, including more than 400,000 American ones, and that entailed the near-extermination of Europe’s Jewish population.
World War II is sometimes called a “good war,” meaning that few dispute American intervention was necessary or that we fought on the right side. But this easy moral clarity is possible only because the Axis actions that started the war were unambiguously evil.
In April 2009 we noted that David Leonhardt, a Krugman colleague at the Times, had praised the economic policies of Germany’s National Socialist Party. Now Krugman calls World War II itself a “miracle.” The Old Gray Lady is in the grips of utter madness.
Then in January, he began echoing David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s stylish 1966 film Blowup, searching Sarah Palin’s clip-art, constantly enlarging and re-enlarging the images, spending hours in the dark room, searching within the grain of the ink, hyper-focused that somewhere, it had to contain within them the secret of a crazed nutter’s attack on Sen. Gabrielle Giffords, Federal Judge John M. Roll, and other victims.
At the start of this week, it was 1968′s 2001: A Space Odyssey:
KRUGMAN: It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better –
ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.
KRUGMAN: No, there was a “Twilight Zone” episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
Today, it’s 1969′s Easy Rider, with a post titled, “Hippie Punching” in which Krugman writes:
I would say this: on one side you have the GOP, which responds to completely crazed Tea Party demands by doing all it can to assure the hard right that it’s on its side. On the other, you have the Democratic establishment or at least part thereof, which responds to complaints from its own base that it’s going too easy on the crazies by lashing out at the base, with a bit of bearded-professor bashing on the side.
Way to strengthen your bargaining position, guys.
As Mickey Kaus responds on that last item at the Daily Caller:
Hippie Check: Paul Krugman decries “hippie punching.” This is now an accepted way to mock almost any contemporary criticism of unabashed liberals. I was a hippie–hippie adjacent anyway. I knew hippies. Hippies were friends of mine. They hated liberals.That goes double for the ’60s New Left. Liberals were the enemy, and many of the New Left’s critiques (e.g. of Big Labor/Big Government corporatism, interest-group politics and anti-participatory bureaucracies) were very similar to today’s Tea Party critiques. …
Of course Krugman is no hippie — he’s a closet Nixon supporter — or at least a supporter of Nixon’s top down, Great Society-era statist domestic policies, as Nick Gillespie of Reason spotted in September of 2009.
Or perhaps he’s what the hippies of the ’60s really hated, the square who only donned his tie-dyed T-shirt on the weekend, and went back to wearing his Florsheim wingtips and Brooks Brothers buttondowns come Monday. Similarly, lurking inside every 21st century Timesman is an aging, weekend psychedelic warrior ready to let his freak flag fly, the equivalent of a middle-aged man in the 1980s nostalgically breaking out the Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller records from around the time of the miracle of the 1940s World War II.
It must be something Pinch looks for when he’s interviewing new recruits.
Related: Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four-million year old black monolith buried under Al Gore’s mansion has remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery.
The debt to GDP ratio now is already the same as it was at the end of WW2.
Krugman is not a sane person.
Exactly right on both counts. Using the example of World War II as “stimulus” is disturbing on any number of levels. Don’t forget we could afford to go into debt because:
a) This was a reall “Axis of Evil” that had to be defeated.
b) We could be reasonably sure that our allies would repay all or most of their
debts.
c) The war left the U.S. as the only undamaged (or unobliterated) industrial
power in the world. We didn’t have much in the way of competition and
could expect to develop the kind of world-leadingeconomy to repay WWII
debt. I wonder why Krugman never mentions this.
Of course not. He’s a liberal. Ipso facto….
JL, my sentiment exactly. Both Krugman being 51 cards short of a full deck and the debt-GDP ratio discussion.
I recall as recent as this past Summer the debt-GDP wouldn’t reach 100% until 2016, 2018, 2021 etc.,
‘Thanks’ Uhbama.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1104/1104.4462.pdf
And NASA, now freed of its odious duties regarding space exploration to concentrate on worthwhile things like Muslim outreach and AGW, has produced a study saying that if we don’t stop global warming at all costs, an alien civilization may destroy us to protect itself.
The idea being that rapid onset warming “proves” that we are a species not in control of itself, and thus likely to be hostile.
(Actually, it is more likely to be proof that said aliens aren’t smart enough to check solar activity levels before they start the planetbusters on their way.)
Based on this NASA “study”, I expect Krugman to be channeling “Independence Day” and/or the Spielberg version of “War of the Worlds” in short order.
And I thought I was devoted to science fiction. Of course, I never confuse it with reality.
clear ether
eon
What no liberal Iconic “Logan’s Run” or “Soylet Green” both movies have societies that the Obama Administration would build or are building.
I watched Paul Krugman on a video played on (I think) O’Reilly’s show a few days ago and he is the most shifty eye’d character I’ve ever seen. He looks like he’s afraid someone is going to sneak up on him or something. His statements only seem to confirm the appearance of being mentally unbalanced. He is not rooted in reality.
“he is the most shifty eye’d character I’ve ever seen.”
Yes, I’ve noticed too. Very, very creepy.
Krugman’s resemblance to a ferret is uncanny! The shifty eyes, the fur, the weasel-like features . . . . it’s all there. There is one tiny difference, however: ferrets know more about economics.
Krug also channeled The Watchmen — the comic book version, not the film — when he said that the threat of alien attack would boost the economy.
As a fan of science fiction (including comic books) I resent that Krugman is giving weirdos who talk about alien invasions a bad name.
So Krugman’s working with the feds? Another Capricorn One thing?
From that US Ministry for Climate Change (NASA), comes this entertaining gem:
Go have a good laugh at the rest, which includes:
Remember: you paid for this. During the worst recession in living memory.
NASA
Un. Frakking. Believable.
Wow. Just wow.
And these guys call themselves scientists and laugh at creationists?!?!? =:0
“… if ETI doubt that our course can be changed, then they may seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us. A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand.”
If NASA has fallen so far as to start giving us policy advice taken directly from “The Day the Earth Stood Still (and the REMAKE VERSION at that)” then they should know that some liberal elite Harvard-type will successfully lobby for more time for humanity and get the “green” aliens to excuse our excesses due to our “youthful exhuberance.” Dammit, did you guys all smoke too much dope and fall asleep before the end of the movie?
Anyway, fore warned is fore armed. Now that you know, start earning your pay, and practice your begging so you can make a persuasive argument to the damn aliens!
Now you skeptics out there, I know what you’re going to say. You’re all “What if the aliens act more like the Original B&W movie scenario, rather than the remake?” No problem, because during the original film, we learned the secret words (Klaatu Barada Nikto) to deactivate the ethnic cleansing robot. Perhaps NASA should set up Klaatu Centers all over the world, so they’ll be nearby and ready to go, just in case. If we did that, it would really impress Muslim terrorists. Who could possibly want to kill infidels after altruism like that? Hey, that reminds me, did the Navy Seals ever say Klaatu Barada Nikto to OBL before dispatching him? Maybe he was really Gort?
So much hard science to perform. So little time.
Krugman is insane. Just look at his eyes and you can see that he’s not all there. Seems like the perfect person to give a Nobel Prize to. He’s just as crazy as the western Europeans who have spent themselves into oblivion. Maybe that’s why Krugman loves the Europeans so much. They have so very much in common when it comes to over spending money they don’t have. And this is the guy who actually wants to spend MORE money we don’t have. That alone should tell you how crazy he is.
Krugman (and many of his lefty supporters) constantly cite the 1950s as a time of prosperity even though we had high marginal tax rates.
I and numerous others have pointed out that the U.S. was prosperous then, because Europe and Japan had been devastated by World War II and needed our stuff to rebuild. Europe and Japan weren’t our competitors back then, they were our customers–and we enjoyed a trade surplus.
Krugman and his friends just ignore that point–they don’t even bother to contest it, just ignore it–and then write the same wrong claim about the 1950s a few days later.
Robert Reich does the same thing.
Perhaps it’s because as antiwar liberals and peaceniks, they dare not admit to themselves how U.S. prosperity of the 1950s was built on war of the 1940s.
I would encourage everyone to go to the IRS site, the tax stats link at the bottom right and the historical archive section and find the PDF for 1960. It’s a large 168 page document with all the tax stats in it. I don’t have the link, I saved it on my PC, but anyone can find it with a little looking. Go right to page 69 of 168 in the PDF (65 in the document). Inside you will find all the myths about high taxation in the 1950′s demolished. First, of the 61 million returns, only 20% paid no taxes, compared to the almost 50% now. Even more, the breakdown is as follows, starting with the highest bracket of $1 million AGI or more. (I’d bet these are mostly movie stars).
Number of returns and the effective tax rate (income tax/adj gross income)
300 47%
700 46%
9000 42-44%
14000 40%
100,000 34%
440,000 24%
323,000 20%
785,000 17%
3637000 14% (this is the 1960 $10,000-15,000 AGI bracket, about 75-110k today)
4650000 12%
The other 35 million begin to go down from there. Only 124,000 out of 61 million paid at 34% or higher. Taxes were lower in 1960 than today. Of course, more than half the people not paying today would be paying something back then, so for those people, yes, you could say taxes are at their lowest ever! For most everyone else currently paying taxes, they are paying a higher % now.
Everyone should retrieve this document and throw this back into the face of people who are claiming 90% rates. As usual, these types only repeat talking points-they never have any facts to back them up with. These are the facts. Who would believe anyone was paying 90% of their income in taxes anyway?
Not that facts have any sway on liberals as they are controlled by emotions vs common sense…
I’m all for the Dems letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire. 75% of all revenue will come from people paying little or no taxes now. The same people who don’t care what the Government debt is or how high tax rates are. They’ve lapped up the talking point of O’Blama thinking only the “rich” will pay. Love to be at the kitchen table when the families making $30 to $60 k figure out they OWE for the first time since 1993
For those who did not structure their income right that 90% really did exist.
Cashes Clay the future Mohammad Ali got trapped for one fight with a five million dollar prize which he go to take home $250,000 after paying agents and Uncle Sam. Surprising numbers of musicians and actors used to get caught in the IRS traps but that was true for the tax systems in Europe too.
Reagan used to say that he just stopped working when he got to $400,000 because every dollar beyond that cost so much effort. Can you imagine where the world would be if Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had lived under those rates and stopped every year at $400,000 dollars?
Related to Krugman, NASA has funded a Penn State University study that is being somewhat lampooned, but perhaps shouldn’t be. In discussing why aliens might destroy humanity, what is getting focused on is the “kill humanity to prevent global environmental devastation.” This is what is getting laughed at, and rightfully so. But there is another part that needs to be looked at–the willingness of aliens to take action to prevent humanity from posing a threat to other races.
Let’s say the aliens have a population cap–or, more critically, think slower than we do, so that despite having better technology, in the long run (years, decades, centuries, millenia–what have you) *know* that we could take them eventually(like a nation of 286 computers trying to fight a nation of Pentiums. The Pentiums will eventually win). In that case , if humanity continues to demonstrate that it will *always* act in a “might makes right” way, as if still in the jungle, with the civilizing principles of the rule of law being nothing more than fig-leafs that never effectively restrain the powerful from doing as they will when they will, then it would make sense for those “aliens” to take a pre-emptive action to limit that faster race’s ability to effect “change” in the universe. So in that sense, I think the report is worth a ponder, and I look forward to seeing Krugman’s space navy being built as we travel on the road to doom (albeit with a wonderfully stimulated economy).
Uh, no. That’s not what needs to be “looked at”.
What needs to be looked at, and laughed at for the silly superstition that it is, is the notion that aliens EXIST in the first place.
We have not ONE SHRED of evidence that life exists anywhere else. NOT ONE SHRED.
We have endless assertions and assumptions, but nothing else.
Science fiction has been substituted for science for decades now.
If SCIENCE truly reigned (y’know, that stuff that’s based on EVIDENCE?), anyone who posited the existence of alien intelligences as a basis for any serious argument would be laughed out of town and fired from any serious job in the sciences.
Today? It’s daring to question this naked emperor that is likely to subject a person to ridicule.
The world is upside down.
I agree heartily–we have not one shred of evidence, and it may be millenia before we ever do–assuming such beings exist. As far as I’m concerned, it is a thought exercise, for philosophical musing if nothing else, and I should think entirely valid in and of itself as a way to expand the mind.
Having said that, I also believe that even with the most pessimistic constants possible for the variables in the Drake equation, that there is at least *one* other planet with life in the universe (universe, not just galaxy, and life, not sentience), just because of the sheer numbers of planets. So to reject the idea of life elsewhere itself is, as far as I’m concerned, betting against the house, and I fell likewise about life that develops sentience, and sentient life that develops technologically. Space, after all, is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
And that means that I would take a bet saying there is life elsewhere.
Oh, I forgot to mention–the Drake equation was, of course, created by astronomer Frank Drake, and popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan–bot persons. So my guess is that both in the past, and today, that when considering the following–”If SCIENCE truly reigned (y’know, that stuff that’s based on EVIDENCE?), anyone who posited the existence of alien intelligences as a basis for any serious argument would be laughed out of town and fired from any serious job in the sciences.”–
…well, my guess is that science still reigns *and* people do posit this stuff and get to hold down real jobs.
And it seems to me it is because they know when to say “we don’t know”. Both when they are for*, and when they are *against*.
Oh, about Drake and Sagan–if I had proofread better, I would have said “both whom were persons of reasonable note in the scientific communities” instead of “both persons”, which I assume they were.
This is silly a planet of 286 computers faced a smarter but less knowlegable planet would seed the smarter planet with a bunch of 8088 computers.
Where did you think Paul Krugman come from? When we figure out how the little green men stuff the ballot box for Chuck Shummer and Barney Frank then we will be ready to fight them.
Let us examine Krugman’s WW2 theory. In 1940-41 we already knew the war was inevitable. A slow military build up was under way but we still spent the first 2 years of WW2 gearing up for winning it. 42 and 43 were more holding actions, build ups and, thanks to some incredibly brave and self-sacrificing poeple, even some victories (Coral Sea Midway, Guadacanal, North Africa etc).
We have such enemies right in front of us, Iran, North Korea, global terrorism and perhaps even China yet; where’s the gradual build up. We are spread across 3 conflicts with no let up in our global committments and yet Obama shrinks our military or stretches it thinner. I do not see this helping the country, but, oh yeah, that’s because in the late 30s and early 40′s we were not saddled with a MULTI-TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT (nor anything like it’s adjusted equivilant). Did professor Krugmann forget that little tidbit? The only thing gearing up to fight ‘space invaders’ would do is throw us further into debt.
I’d rather have our economy run by Pauly Shore than Pauly Krugman.
The best thing about WWII from an economics perspective is that it was not run by the new dealers but by General George Marshal and the war production board. The replacement of the New Deal economics was the most important day of the war. The next most important day was Aug. 6, 1945.
If space alien invasion would replace all of the political hack progressives in the Obama administration over night I would declare it myself. Even if it meant being carried off in a strait jacket as long as I had a padded room separate from Krugman’s.
Krugman may be going insane.
It has to be hard for someone with his ego to see everything he spent his life prosthelytizing for turn into such total failures. I’m assumining he has at least normal intelligence and doesn’t live in a fantasy world. It has to be incredible difficult trying to reconcile total failure with the concept of winning the world’s supposedly top prize for intelligence. Isn’t that a prescription for, at least, schysophrenia, or worse?
Why?
Because assuming he lives in a fantasy world assumes by definition that he is insane. I’m trying to explain his insanity, not merely declare it.
Other famous Nobel Winners that are just as credible
Al Gore – Made a hundred million off of hot air
Barack Obama – Hope and change… 9.2 unemployment; vacationing in the vineyard
Yassat Arafat – Terrorist promoted by Jimmy Carter as humanitarian
Jimmy Carter – The southern cracker that hates jews…like the other 3 above
I guess it’s not just the fault of Krugman’s wife, writing his column for him. He really has gone bonkers. But PC Hollywood style — you can’t actually have a war with anyone worth fighting in the movies, so you have to have space aliens. (Or Neo Nazis, but even Krugman probably doesn’t think there are enough of those.)
Even the stupid Battleship movie, from the peg-based board game, has us fighting space aliens. So when you cross the frickin’ galaxy you what, land with a submarine, a cruiser, a battleship, a carrier, and a sneaky little destroyer (it’s on I-8 and I-9!). That’ll fix those earthlings!
the four-million year old black monolith buried under Al Gore’s mansion
Isn’t there a black monolith in Mecca?
“Isn’t there a black monolith in Mecca?”
Yes, but when you touch that one it lowers your intelligence.
The science fiction program Krugman alludes to wasn’t THE TWILIGHT ZONE, it was THE OUTER LIMITS. Not only is Krugman ignorant of sound economics, he’s also clueless about sci-fi TV.
It wasn’t Twilight Zone; it was Outer Limits, and starred Robert Culp. Klugman’s knowledge about classic TV, is matched only by his knowledge of economics.
Opps, I meant Krugman.
I’d call Krugman a raging loon, but I hesitate, as I don’t want to cast insults against a very noble bird.
But it seems most Americans still don’t get it:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/08/25/with-pessimism-growing-on-economy-more-americans-still-blame-bush-over-obama/