Veronique de Rugy:
I don’t quite agree with de Rugy here on the efficacy of the later Bush tax cuts, but I think she’s more or less on the money. The Keynesians have yet to explain why the biggest spending President in American history (so far) who ran up the biggest debts (until Obama) and slathered the nation with demand-side tax cuts failed to produce an unending economic boom.
We can’t pretend that Obamanomics started … Read more
OK. So yesterday, Obama said this in an economy speech. I’ll give the entire quote so you don’t think it’s out of context:
We’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the past 27 months. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing problems is with state and local government, often with cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help they’re accustomed to from the federal government.
(Aside before I … Read more
Wasn’t it just like a week ago that Paul “Wrong Way” Krugman was praising Argentina? And wasn’t it this week that he gushed over Japan’s growth, stimulated by tsunami reconstruction?
Oops:
Recently, two more countries have felt the bite of Keynesianism. Today, the credit ratings agency Fitch downgraded Japan’s economy and the AP reported that the Argentinian economy is likely to decline sharply. While Japan and Argentina might be different kinds of economies
Read this. Then read this. The first is Paul Krugman praising Argentina’s “economic model” of plundering, theft and deception, claiming its performance has been comparable to Brazil’s. The second is Juan Carlos Hidalgo’s response pointing out that Krugman (1) uses Argentina’s official inflation numbers, which economic journals have stopped using because they are transparent lies; (2) starts his analysis two years after Argentina’s recession began; (3) compares Argentina with a relatively poorly-performing country … Read more
Ron Paul and Paul Krugman had a debate about economics (apologies for the link, which auto-plays). You can read Tyler Cowen’s commentary here. I agree with his final take:
There were too many times when RP simply piled polemic points on top of each other and stopped making a sequential argument. He overrates the costs of inflation, including in the long term, and for a believer in the market finds it remarkably non-robust in
In a move that doesn’t surprise people like me a bit, and which the LSM will simply ignore and thus allowing others that feel unless the LSM says it word for word, it isn’t so, we now find out that the stimulus patronage bill has had it’s price tag increased and its positive impact majorly downgraded:
Recovery: After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it
Kevin Drum has a post up addressing various “Right Wing Myths” about the economy. Some of these myths are self-refuting: he claims the stimulus worked because economic models indicate that it should have worked, he repeats the claim that 1937 proved Keynesian theory (ignoring that 1946 refuted it), he pretends that the Reagan tax cuts didn’t stimulate the economy, he ignores an anti-correlation between unemployment and profits, he claims that since a narrow plurality cite … Read more
I always kind of liked Austan Goolsbee. He was one of the few reasons I had hope that this Administration wouldn’t completely screw the economic pooch. After he resigned, I saw him on The Daily Show and he was giddy as a schoolgirl at the prospect of leaving politics.
And now it looks like Austan is off-message:
Former Obama administration economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said Thursday that if given a second chance he would
Krugman, that jackass that was given a Nobel prize in Eonomics for being a good old fashioned Keynesian idiot and the politics that permeate the entire Nobel prize process, is out with another doozy. This time it isn’t some economic idiocy, but him saying that Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror.
I am not surprised Krugman feels this way. I recall … Read more
Barack Obama is supposed to talk jobs tonight. Of course, what he’s really going to talk is spending, likely on our “crumbling infrastructure”. Gregg Eastebrook has a roundup of what our efforts to deal with this cost:
*Boston’s Big Dig, mostly funded by the federal taxpayer though benefits went exclusively to Massachusetts, was supposed to take 10 years at a cost of $6.2 billion in today’s dollars. Instead it took 21 years and cost $22
