VILLAINS-Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is an idiot. I wrote that sentence so all the people Googling "Paul Krugman is an idiot" will find their way to this article. Paul Krugman is a moron. Paul Krugman is a douche. Paul Krugman is a liar.

That is a less than elegant opening paragraph composed of suggested Google search terms. Needless to say, Paul Krugman has a lot of detractors, and I am one of them.

Paul Krugman is a leftard which wouldn't be so bad except that he is an intellectually disingenuous leftard. He is a Keynesian who plays loose with the facts. He has a scattershot approach to his thinking. Like Michael Moore, he slings shit against the wall and runs with whatever sticks even if what sticks totally undermines earlier arguments he made. As former NYT ombudsman Daniel Okrent put it, Krugman had "the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults."

Basically, Krugman is an idiot. His success comes from being a brilliant idiot. He has built a reputation as being a scholarly economist with academic credentials and a Nobel prize. Among his economics peers, he talks the talk. Outside of the academic arena, he is a blithering partisan fool. It is as if he were two completely different people. I often wonder if his economist wife writes his columns for him. At best, we can say that Krugman is a schizoid.

The reality is that Krugman says exactly what he thinks will get him the attention he craves. In academic circles, he craves respect, so he acts respectable. In political circles, he craves fame and notoriety, so he spews out whatever horseshit will get him headlines. And it works. Krugman is Michael Moore with a Ph.D.

The problem with being such an ass clown is that people recognize you as an ass clown later on. Even people who might be inclined to agree with you put some daylight between you and them. This is why you won't see Krugman with a position in the Obama administration anytime soon.

The Krugman solutions are these:

-Expand the welfare state to bring about European style socialism

-Stimulate aggregate demand with government spending

-Inflate your way out of debt

The problems with these solutions have been documented endlessly, but Krugman has a peculiar talent for ignoring all contrary arguments and seeing and believing only those facts which confirm the conclusion he has already drawn. To hear him talk or read his writings is dizzying. When cornered, he retreats into complexity. He will dazzle you with his bullshit. Compare this to a good Austrian or Chicago school economist who have the opposite talent of making their positions cogent and easily understood.

Krugman is a typical leftard--brilliant and stupid at the same time. These fucknuts resort to tricks instead of truth and rely on their reality distortion fields and their faux reputations to make an argument. But at the end of the day, ask yourself these questions:

-Can you make the poor rich by impoverishing the rich?

-Can you spend your way out of debt?

-Can you create wealth with a printing press?

Krugman's answer to all these questions is YES. This is why he is a fool, a fucktard, a cocksucker, a son of a bitch, a shithead, a douche, a worthless piece of shit, and a goddamn liar.

THE QUOTABLE KRUGMAN:

Those tax cuts, rather than the spending binge, are the primary cause of the (federal) deficit.

Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

During phases of weak growth there are always those who say that lower interest rates will not help. They overlook the fact that low interest rates act through several channels. For instance, more housing is built, which expands the building sector. You must ask the opposite question: why in the world shouldn’t you lower interest rates?

Consumers, who already have low savings and high debt, probably can’t contribute much. But housing, which is highly sensitive to interest rates, could help lead a recovery…. But there has been a peculiar disconnect between Fed policy and the financial variables that affect housing and trade. Housing demand depends on long-term rather than short-term interest rates — and though the Fed has cut short rates from 6.5 to 3.75 percent since the beginning of the year, the 10-year rate is slightly higher than it was on Jan. 1…. Sooner or later, of course, investors will realize that 2001 isn’t 1998. When they do, mortgage rates and the dollar will come way down, and the conditions for a recovery led by housing and exports will be in place.

Guys, read it again. It wasn’t a piece of policy advocacy, it was just economic analysis. What I said was that the only way the Fed could get traction would be if it could inflate a housing bubble. And that’s just what happened.

It’s true that if China dumped its U.S. assets the value of the dollar would fall against other major currencies, such as the euro. But that would be a good thing for the United States, since it would make our goods more competitive and reduce our trade deficit. On the other hand, it would be a bad thing for China, which would suffer large losses on its dollar holdings. In short, right now America has China over a barrel, not the other way around.

Posted in: