Overrated: Paul Krugman

July/August 2012

This is where the Keynesian ignorance of the long run demonstrated by Krugman leads you: lurching from one catastrophe to the next with a series of increasingly expensive quick fixes of ever shorter duration which do nothing to address the underlying problems.

The economic problems of Greece, Spain, and Britain are not that the deficits of 7 per cent, 7 per cent and 8 per cent their governments are respectively running are not high enough. Greek labour costs are higher than elsewhere and Greece doesn't export very much. Spain has unemployment of 24 per cent thanks to a labour market which makes job creation almost impossible. Britain is already one of the most indebted nations on the planet.

These fundamental problems are ignored by Krugman and his followers. In his 1994 book Peddling Prosperity Krugman accused the supply-side economists of the 1980s of being "cranks" selling "snake oil" because, he said, they offered politically expedient economic non-remedies with no basis in fact. Hypocrisy, thy name is Krugman.

As for that Nobel Prize, Paul Krugman won it for his work on international trade patterns, not his crackpot Keynesianism. Sir Paul McCartney won an Ivor Novello award for writing "Yesterday". That doesn't mean sentimental schlock like "Mull of Kintyre" is worth listening to.

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Larry E

July 18th, 2012
5:07 PM

Pulp economist Krugman abandoned any scientific or economic integrity long ago, replacing it with pure partisan politics. In his drive to support Obama's policies, Krugman is all, "Tax more, tax more, stimulate the economy more, spend more, the government needs more money." Krugman is the Ex-Lax economist, always attempting to "stimulate" the economy and so support Obama. P.S. I like the novel approach to captcha used on this page. At least we humans can READ the damned thing.

Fred Soddy

July 13th, 2012
12:07 PM

Fifth form rant wrenching quotes out of context. Must do better.

Ron Edge

June 28th, 2012
7:06 PM

Oh, c'mon!! You know as well as I do that the vast majority of that money, under some tricky means, is going to the Financiers of ine strip or another, who, largely, created the Crash in '08 by their "Bad Bets" and, in many cases in the USA, the outright lying/cheating of home buyers. Allowing Commodities Brokers to take the same route of Farmers meant that rampant Speculation is strangling those at, or near the Poverty Levels. Same for Medical Bankruptcies whose condition has soared but is no longer a situation for which ANY of the 99% can no longer use to declare Bankruptcy... since...'06? Not germane, you say? These people are wiped out and not likely to be among the taxpaying public for some time to come; since this situation affects ("Afflicts", might be a better word since its been imposed on the 99%) 100's of thousands, this lowers the Tax Base available, no? "Supply-Side Economics" is what caused the '08 crash and, since Obama, you wouldn't know for all the whining on the Right, hasn't done a damn thing different than Cheney, Bush or any other NeoCon. So, whether Obama or Romney is elected, expect more of the same; with the economy in the dumps, when its not being shipped to our deadly enemies in the Middle East, China and Russia, to name three. All-in-all, I'd say that

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