PRINCETON, NJ - OCTOBER 13: Princeton Professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman smiles during a press conference to announce his winning the Nobel Prize October 13, 2008 in Princeton, New Jersey. Krugman was given the prestigious award, which includes a prize of $1.4 million for his work on economic trade theory. (Photo by Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images)
World renowned economist Paul Krugman is definitely not a fan of foolishness, so needless to say, he cannot stand Donald Trump. That said, Krugman evaluated the economic/trade aspect of Monday night’s debate and Krugman concluded that Donald Trump was talking nothing but garbage when he talked down the US economy.
There were specifics: China is “devaluing” (not so — it was holding down the yuan five years ago, but these days it’s intervening to keep the yuan up, not down.) There was this, on Mexico:
Let me give you the example of Mexico. They have a VAT tax. We’re on a different system. When we sell into Mexico, there’s a tax. When they sell in — automatic, 16 percent, approximately. When they sell into us, there’s no tax. It’s a defective agreement. It’s been defective for a long time, many years, but the politicians haven’t done anything about it.
Gah. A VAT is basically a sales tax. It is levied on both domestic and imported goods, so that it doesn’t protect against imports — which is why it’s allowed under international trade rules, and not considered a protectionist trade policy. I get that Trump is not an economist — hoo boy, is he not an economist — but this is one of his signature issues, so you might have expected him to learn a few facts.
More broadly, Trump’s whole view on trade is that other people are taking advantage of us — that it’s all about dominance, and that we’re weak. And even if you think we’ve pushed globalization too far, even if you are worried about the effects of trade on income distribution, that’s just a foolish way to think about the problem.
So don’t score Trump as somehow winning on trade. Yes, he blustered more confidently on that subject than on anything else. But he was talking absolute garbageeven there.
According to Paul Krugman, President Obama is a better President than Ronald Reagan ever was. Krugman ranks the present President third behind FDR and LBJ. According to the Nobel Price winner, the most consequential presidents so far are FDR, LBJ, President Obama and then Ronald Reagan.
Former President Ronald Reagan has been used and cited by Conservatives and Republicans as the standard bearer for being a great American president.
Krugman says he ranked Obama above Reagan because, among other things, “Reagan did not leave the structure of American society particularly different.” Krugman said that Reagan “did not in fact change the basic legacy of Lyndon Johnson and FDR.” When compared to President Obama and the policies he has so far put in place, Krugman argues that “Obama really has left the world, has left America a different place.”
Krugman cited the Affordable Care Act, financial reform, and environmental policies as Obama’s chief accomplishments, while arguing that the economy didn’t go off a cliff and that Obama kept us from idiotic foreign entanglements.
I haven’t been writing about the healthcare.gov thing, for the simple reason that I have nothing to say. What’s going on isn’t a policy question: we know from the states with working exchanges (including California) that the underlying structure of the law is workable. Instead, it’s about an implementation botch, which is an incredible mess, and reflects very badly on Obama. But the future of the reform depends not on policy per se but on whether the IT issues can be fixed well enough soon enough, a subject on which I have zero expertise.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped other people from breathlessly commenting on every twist and turn in the polls, every meaningless vote in the House, and so on. Hey, it’s a living.
But at this point there’s enough information coming in to make semi-educated guesses — and it looks to me as if this thing is probably going to stumble through to the finish line. State-run enrollments are mostly going pretty well; Medicaid expansion is going very well (and it’s expanding even in states that have rejected the expansion, because more people are learning they’re eligible.) And healthcare.gov, while still pretty bad, is starting to look as if it will be good enough in a few weeks for large numbers of people to sign up, either through the exchanges or directly with insurers.
If all this is right, by the time open enrollment ends in March, millions of previously uninsured Americans will in fact have received coverage under the law, and reform will be irreversible. Obama personally may never recover his reputation; Democratic hopes of a wave election in 2014 are probably gone, although you never know. But anyone counting on Obamacare to collapse is probably making a very bad bet.
Paul Krugman writes: Early this year, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, made headlines by telling his fellow Republicans that they needed to stop being the “stupid party.” Unfortunately, Mr. Jindal failed to offer any constructive suggestions about how they might do that. And, in the months that followed, he himself proceeded to say and do a number of things that were, shall we say, not especially smart.
Nonetheless, Republicans did follow his advice. In recent months, the G.O.P. seems to have transitioned from being the stupid party to being the crazy party.
I know, I’m being shrill. But as it grows increasingly hard to see how, in the face of Republican hysteria over health reform, we can avoid a government shutdown — and maybe the even more frightening prospect of a debt default — the time for euphemism is past.
…..
True, there was the government shutdown of 1995. But this was widely recognized after the fact as both an outrage and a mistake. And that confrontation came just after a sweeping Republican victory in the midterm elections, allowing the G.O.P. to make the case that it had a popular mandate to challenge what it imagined to be a crippled, lame-duck president.
Today, by contrast, Republicans are coming off an election in which they failed to retake the presidency despite a weak economy, failed to retake the Senate even though far more Democratic than Republican seats were at risk, and held the House only through a combination of gerrymandering and the vagaries of districting. Democrats actually won the popular ballot for the House by 1.4 million votes. This is not a party that, by any conceivable standard of legitimacy, has the right to make extreme demands on the president.
Yet, at the moment, it seems highly likely that the Republican Party will refuse to fund the government, forcing a shutdown at the beginning of next month, unless President Obama dismantles the health reform that is the signature achievement of his presidency. Republican leaders realize that this is a bad idea, but, until recently, their notion of preaching moderation was to urge party radicals not to hold America hostage over the federal budget so they could wait a few weeks and hold it hostage over the debt ceiling instead. Now they’ve given up even on that delaying tactic. The latest news is that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, has abandoned his efforts to craft a face-saving climbdown on the budget, which means that we’re all set for shutdown, possibly followed by debt crisis.
How did we get here?
Some pundits insist, even now, that this is somehow Mr. Obama’s fault. Why can’t he sit down with Mr. Boehner the way Ronald Reagan used to sit down with Tip O’Neill? But O’Neill didn’t lead a party whose base demanded that he shut down the government unless Reagan revoked his tax cuts, and O’Neill didn’t face a caucus prepared to depose him as speaker at the first hint of compromise.
No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.
But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created.
So now we get to witness the hilarious spectacle of Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, pleading with Republicans to recognize the reality that Obamacare can’t be defunded. Why hilarious? Because Mr. Rove and his colleagues have spent decades trying to ensure that the Republican base lives in an alternate reality defined by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Can we say “hoist with their own petard”?
Of course, the coming confrontations are likely to damage America as a whole, not just the Republican brand. But, you know, this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.
We’re bringing you a bit of news we’ve already known for some time, but it feels good repeating it again – and again! So just in case there’s anyone out there who doesn’t already know, this makes it official – one more time!
A new study confirms the following – that liberal reporters and pundits stick to the facts, while the conservatives’ excuse for a reporter/pundit simply make stuff up.
The most interesting conclusion of the report is the confirmation that liberals are accurate more often than conservatives. That may be the result of the inherent slant of factual information that was first identified by fake pundit Stephen Colbert who noted that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
The top performer in the study is Paul Krugman of the New York Times. The worst performer is uber-pundit George Will.
I am a little disappointed though, I thought Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh would have definitely tied for last. And let’s not forget a previous study that finds Fox News just makes stuff up.
Although the Republicans took over control of the House of Representatives in November and demanded an almost $1 trillion increase to the deficit to provide a tax cut to the rich, a recent poll suggests that the-government-is-spending-too-much-we-must-reduce-the-deficit Teaparty is now happier than ever before.
The poll, conducted by Pew Research Center finds that fewer people are angry at the government. Pew reports;
Overall, the percentage saying they are angry with the federal government has fallen from 23% last September to 14% today, with much of the decline coming among Republicans and Tea Party supporters.
Not surprisingly, the poll breaks down along party lines, with Republicans showing a more favorable outlook at the government. Back in September 2010, 33% claimed to be angry, as compared to 16% now. The excitement among the Teapartiers saw a 19 point increase, with their anger at government in September 2010 at 47%, but falling to 28% now. Democrats on the other hand showed a September 2010 anger level of 11%, and falling to 10% now.
Besides a $900 billion increase in the deficit, what else have the Republicans done to generate such happiness amongst Republicans and the Teaparty electorate?
Well, they really haven’t done much of anything else. What they have done is made a lot of promises! Apparently, these promises are enough for the Teaparty and their fellow Republicans. Among the promises;
Repealing Health care, which will add another $230 billion more to the deficit according to CBO
A promise to cut $61 billion from the budget, that would reduce services to pregnant women and, according to economist Paul Krugman, would “literally be stealing food from the mouths of babes.”
John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives has promised to slash jobs by as much as 200,000, and another 700,000 this year’s end.
These are just some of the promises the Republican electorate are elated about. Adding trillions to the deficit, increasing unemployment and causing what many economists call a slowdown in our economic recovery. These actions just tickles the Teaparty.
Just imagine their joy if we plunge into another great depression.
The Republican Party would like Americans to believe they are all for deficit reduction. Of course, their position on the deficit and spending can easily be refuted by the free pass they gave the Bush Administration, who conducted business in Washington like they were playing with monopoly money. That said, the Teaparty was hatched to keep Obama in check, and the November midterm election saw much of their members elected to Congress.
They rode into Washington claiming to have a mandate from the Teaparty the –reduction of America’s deficit–and in keeping with this mandate, Republican leaders in the house began making the usual promises . One of those promises was a reduction of $100 billion, a feat easier said than done, and one that can only be accomplished through drastically slashing services that benefit many Americans. The Teaparty demanded these spending cuts, and the House Republicans are determined to please.
So what’s a Republicans to do?
Paul Krugman – a nobel price winner for Economics – wrote an article in then New York Times in which he explains the plight the Republican leaders face. As Krugman explains, Republicans will “sacrifice the future.”
Focus the cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy.
If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)
Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.
Sacrificing America’s future just to win the next vote. But then again we are talking about the Republican party, and with them, it has always been party before country, regardless of what John McCain’s 2008 presidential slogan was!
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