NYC Letter: Today's Big Stupid -- Paul Krugman, Stupid Again! Encore! Redux

Day 1,221 of CHOPE

Special "Watch The Skies" Edition

Nobel laureate (obligatory mention) and former Enron advisor Paul Krugman begins a pattern of recycling earlier Big Stupids. Bigger. Stupider. And now, he claims this Big Stupid is a "serious proposal".

WAR IS INFRASTRUCTURE!
Who Is Thwarting The Alien Invasion Spending?

This is hard to get people to do, much better, obviously, to build bridges and roads and healthcare clinics and schools. But my proposed, I actually have a serious proposal which is that we have to get a bunch of scientists to tell us that we're facing a threatened alien invasion, and in order to be prepared for that alien invasion we have to do things like build high-speed rail. And the, once we've recovered, we can say, "Look, there were no aliens."

But look, I mean, whatever it takes because right now we need somebody to spend, and that somebody has to be the U.S. government.

Paul Krugman,
NYT columnist and Earth warlord
REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER
HOLLYWOOD May 26, 2012 (NewsBusters)

Everyone! Quick! Into the Acela! Those aliens will never catch us in our high-speed train to -- dense urban metropolises where we can be herded like cattle.

Now, you might be thinking, "The Bill Maher show? That show was made for stupid." But Mr. Krugman insists this is a "serious proposal". What Mr. Krugman is serious about is not malevolent aliens, what he is serious about is deceiving the public and defrauding the government.

Here is a nice carve up.

KRUG ATTACKS!
The Nation’S Most Dangerous Economist, Paul Krugman,
Releases Another Book With His Only Idea For Dems —
Spend More Money
By Kyle Smith

May 27, 2012 (NYPost) - Krugman is a most unusual economist. Others may measure their words, issue caveats, acknowledge that the research isn’t conclusive, admit that their biases influence their reading of facts. Not Krugman. Krugman is remarkable for his freewheeling writing style, which frequently leads to lively metaphors ("invisible bond-market vigilantes", "confidence fairy"). He is often dismissive, misleading and tendentious. He changes the subject, ignores inconvenient evidence and plays playground bully to people he sees as ideological enemies (a list longer than Nixon’s). He blasts away at others’ work without even providing the basic courtesy of a link to what he’s talking about, which is a disservice to readers who might like to review the other side of the argument to decide for themselves.

... Krugman’s problem, as he reminds us in "End This Depression Now!" (W. W. Norton & Company) is that he is a fanatic in the grip of a religion called "Keynesianism" which says you should borrow and spend your way out of a recession.

Actually Mr. Krugman is in the grip of something far worse, his own unchallengeable opinion -- though it is often at odds with itself.

The problem remains: We’ve got a debt that’s approaching $16,000,000,000,000. Center-left columnist Kinsley wrote, "I have been waiting for Paul Krugman to tell me how we are going to handle the debt, once we get this recession out of the way. No, really. There’s no economist whose judgment I trust more ... But don’t we at some point have to start paying the money back? Why have taxes at all? Why deny ourselves anything money can buy? If $15 trillion in debt can be a freebie, why not $30 trillion or $60 trillion?"

Krugman, typically, humiliated Kinsley on a technical point about inflation vs. hyperinflation and let this whopper of a question sit there, knowing that if he had his way, the debt would be several trillions larger than it is.
Earlier this year Krugman wrote, "People think of debt’s role in the economy as if it were the same as what debt means for an individual: There’s a lot of money you have to pay to someone else. But that’s all wrong; the debt we create is basically money we owe to ourselves, and the burden it imposes does not involve a real transfer of resources."

In 2003, when the debt was less than half what it is today, he wrote, "We’re looking at a fiscal crisis that will drive interest rates sky-high... But what’s really scary — what makes a fixed-rate mortgage seem like such a good idea — is the looming threat to the federal government’s solvency... How will the train wreck play itself out? ... My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt."

Inflation to pay current bills, a reference to hyperinflation, is exactly what he would later ridicule Kinsley for worrying about.

In 1996, Krugman...said Social Security has a "Ponzi-game aspect in which each generation takes out more than it put in." Last year he said it "is and always has been mainly a pay-as-you-go system, which is nothing like a classic Ponzi scheme."

... When Harvard Professor Mankiw doubted the Obama administration’s projection of 15.6% real growth between 2008 and 2013, Krugman accused him of "deliberate obtuseness" in a post titled "Roots of Evil". Mankiw offered to wager on the matter but got no response. That was smart: The economy will have to catch fire and grow at about 7% between now and the end of 2013 for the Obama projection to come true.

This month Krugman gave us a great summation of why he refuses to even stick to one set of wrong-headed ideas. He has a short attention span, like politicians focused on the next election cycle.

"It’s usually far from clear," Krugman wrote, "what exactly the long-run policy is supposed to be, other than the fact that it involves inflicting pain on workers and the poor." Far from clear? Such uncharacteristic modesty! You knew Krugman was just building up to a one-liner, the one that showed how careless he was about consequences: "In the long run, we are all dead."

Oh, final thought for Mr. Krugman. When proposing a "serious proposal" to get a "bunch of scientists" to lie about an alien invasion in order to hijack the nation's wealth, don't announce it to us rubes who can't tell the difference between the brilliance of your seriousity and the Roland Emmerich flick. We might get suspicious.

CHOPE.

Orson Wells, call your agent.