Paul Krugman

Pin It

There Is No Politics of Austerity

by Elias Isquith on April 29, 2013

OB RH546 bkrved DV 20120109133902

I don’t mean to turn this blog into Shit My Krugman Says, but this, on the underlying politics of austerity, is just too on-the-mark to ignore:

[T]he anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political. It’s driven by hostility to active government policy and, in many cases, hostility to any intellectual approach that might make room for government policy. Too many influential people just don’t want to believe that we’re facing the kind of economic crisis we are actually facing.

I think you can extend it further. Because the other side, the folks Krugman is lumping together as “pro-Keynesian,” are trumpeting policies they’d support even if the economy was better. (I’m excluding economists from this latter group; for them, the term Keynesian holds a very specific meaning, one removed from partisan politics.) I’d think the idea of giving money to the poor was a good one even if unemployment were at 4 percent. And I’d want to raise taxes on capital gains and sundry financial transactions even if quarterly growth were robust instead of middling.

As a result of my thinking this way, I don’t take seriously any talk of “austerity politics,” as if it were something fundamentally new or distinct from politics during times of plenty. It’s not — not really. Liberals wanted more-active government during the years of bubble-fueled growth, and they still do now. Conservatives wanted low taxes and fewer government services when incomes were rising, and they still do now.

The economy contracts and grows. Individual politicians ascend and fall. The surroundings and the players change. But the song remains the same.

{ 70 comments }

Pin It

Class War at the New York Times!

by Elias Isquith on April 27, 2013

2007DS67 428

So Paul Krugman got a little pink in his latest column:

The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.

And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?

I hope not; I’d like to believe that ideas and evidence matter, at least a bit. Otherwise, what am I doing with my life? But I guess we’ll see just how much cynicism is justified.

So there you have it, the New York Times, proclaiming class struggle across the land!

It’s definitely a little weird seeing this in the staid, bourgeois pages of the Grey Lady; her audience tends to be on the wealthier side, after all. But inequality has gotten so extreme that even a goodly chunk of the New York Times’ audience can justifiably feel that they’re on the outside, looking in on — or rather up at — the economic party being enjoyed by the select few.

Earlier in the column, Krugman cites a new paper by Bartels, Seawright, and Page which found that the wealthy’s policy preferences diverge considerably from everyone else’s. They tend to care first and foremost about the deficit — and their preferred solution is cuts, cuts, and cuts; to Medicare, to Social Security, to Medicaid. It’d seem odd if it weren’t mirrored in every way by the national dialogue, where the wealthy’s priorities masquerade as the national interest.

If this doesn’t sound like many people you know — or if you yourself are lucky enough to be financially secure, but still don’t particularly yearn for the return of social contract circa 1896 — it’s probably because you think you’re what the authors would consider “wealthy.” But when they say wealthy, they mean wealthy: the average wealth for those the study categorized as wealthy? Fourteen-million dollars.

And that, friends, is how you get the New York Times to sound like a gateway drug to Pravda. (Except, y’know, not really.)

{ 126 comments }

Pin It

Reinhart and Rogoff Don’t Matter

by Elias Isquith on April 17, 2013

1119 simpson bowles

Paul Krugman echoes my thoughts about Reinhart and Rogoff and austerity — basically, if the austerians hadn’t picked them as their intellectual cover, they would’ve chosen someone else:

Again, however, the larger story is the evident urge of Very Serious People to find excuses for inflicting pain.

Actually, it’s not even enough to say that austerians would’ve found someone else, because part of the power of the idea of austerity is its intuitive — and even moralistic — appeal.

Spending is gluttony, redemption for which can only come through suffering. You don’t lose weight by eating more. You don’t manage your personal finances by spending more. The “easy” or painless route can’t be the right one. Life should be hard. And so on.

The confluence of these deeply ingrained cultural suppositions — and you best believe I’m blaming you, Protest Work Ethic — leads to a powerful desire on the part of some to inflict economic suffering, or “tough medicine.”

Not incidentally, the strongest proponents of austerity tend to have little to lose as a result of their chosen policies. But even if they did, I think most of them would still be arguing for pain. It just feels right.

UPDATE: Be sure you read this report from Tim Fernholz at Quartz. His selection from Senator Tom Coburn’s recent book is just devastating:

Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Georgia and always a gentleman, stood up to ask his question: “Do we need to act this year? Is it better to act quickly?”

“Absolutely,” Rogoff said. “Not acting moves the risk closer,” he explained, because every year of not acting adds another year of debt accumulation. “You have very few levers at this point,” he warned us.

…

Reinhart…echoed Conrad’s point and explained that countries rarely pass the 90 percent debt-to-GDP tipping point precisely because it is dangerous to let that much debt accumulate. She said, “If it is not risky to hit the 90 percent threshold, we would expect a higher incidence.”

Senator and former governor Mike Johanns, a Republican from Nebraska, asked, “Is there a point at which the debt market rebels?”

“I don’t want to be fire and brimstone,” Rogoff said. “No one knows when this will happen. ” Yet, he added, “It takes more than two years to turn the ship around … Once you’ve waited too long, it’s hard to take radical steps.”

 

{ 3 comments }

Pin It

Paul Krugman doesn’t (but really does) want you to know just what he thinks of David Brooks

by Elias Isquith on October 12, 2011

I don’t write much about David Brooks because there are already a lot of people in the blogosphere who do so admirably, have been at it quite some time, and deserve to have this bountiful territory for themselves since they were the ones willing to spend so many years uprooting its myriad and multiplying weeds. So rather than focus on his latest column—very bad, even by his lowly standards—I’d like to focus on his colleague Paul Krugman’s response, which tip-toes along the boundary the Times likes to maintain between its various “brands,” to keep them from sniping at one another and thus reducing the (absurd) sense of unified comity amongst its personalities that it so cultivates.

Brooks’s column is a rather snide and huffy broadside against the Occupy Wall Street protestors, in which, in his characteristic manner of having no self-awareness whatsoever, every liberal’s favorite conservative essentially argues that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are the real radicals—because, after all, what’s more radical than asking the poor to sacrifice?—and that the OWS folks are just a bunch of mean dummies. The whole thing is a rather transparently defensive and insecure wagging of the finger at a movement that is in many ways the antithesis of Brooks’s profoundly elitist and anti-democratic worldview; by its end you almost expect Brooks to go into full-on Thoughtful Burkean Conservative mode and write of the Wall Street bankers with the same kind of purple, mawkish language that the father of conservatism used to sing Marie Antoinette’s praises. Ho-hum stuff from Bobo, really.

What did catch my eye, however, was the section where Brooks attempts to martial numbers to his cause—an always perilous endeavor—and cites the right-wing Tax Foundation:

If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being cheated by the richest and greediest 1 percent.

This is a theme that allows the people in the 99 percent to think very highly of themselves. All their problems are caused by the nefarious elite.

Unfortunately, almost no problem can be productively conceived in this way. A group that divides the world between the pure 99 percent and the evil 1 percent will have nothing to say about education reform, Medicare reform, tax reform, wage stagnation or polarization. They will have nothing to say about the way Americans have overconsumed and overborrowed. These are problems that implicate a much broader swath of society than the top 1 percent.

They will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state. Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If you confiscate all the income of those making more than $10 million, you reduce the debt by 2 percent. You would still be nibbling only meekly around the edges.

I wasn’t shocked to see this talking point because it’s one I’ve seen more than a few right-wingers martial to their defense online. It’s not quite as ubiquitous as the 53%-47% red herring, but it’s close. My internal response was to note how silly it is to gauge the effectiveness of raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy against the size of the debt not the deficit—and to discount entirely the other reasons one would propose this measure, like the reduction of inequality—and leave it at that. But an hour or so later I came across Paul Krugman’s response on the blog and found out that the silliness goes far, far deeper:

I read David Brooks citing the Tax Foundation this morning, and I thought he must have misread them. They couldn’t possibly have compared one year’s take from higher taxes on the rich with the total stock of debt, could they? They can’t possibly be that stupid, or think that their readers are that stupid, can they?

Yes they did. They actually find that their version of the “Buffett rule” would collect $120 billion a year, which is a seriously significant sum. But they try to make it look small by comparing one year’s revenue with the total debt outstanding.

I mean, the standard scoring method in Washington involves using 10-year projections — and even that is flawed, because the real budget issues are much longer-term than that. But nobody, nobody thinks it makes sense to estimate the effect of a revenue proposal on future debt by looking only at the first year’s receipts.

This deliberate fraud — because that’s what it has to be — is an example of the reasons knowledgeable people don’t trust the Tax Foundation.

You don’t really have to read between the lines on this one to see that Krugman is calling Brooks, through the Tax Foundation proxy, one or all of the following: stupid, dishonest, and unknowledgeable. Although these two have a history of obliquely going after one another in the Grey Lady’s pages, it’s been a while since one took such an obvious shot at the other. Maybe if Occupy Wall Street does nothing else, it’ll lead to the Times allowing them to hurl invective at each other—misdirection free—just once.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Pin It

10 years removed, a different memorial to September 11

by Elias Isquith on September 11, 2011

In case you didn’t know, this weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. It’s unlikely you don’t know this, of course—not just because the date 9/11 has been so seared into nearly every Americans’ consciousness, but because of the national media blitz that has accompanied this dark day’s turning a decade old. Supposedly, the past week’s obsessive focus upon the event is in service of a national act of honoring the fallen and remembering. What we’re to remember, however, is not made especially clear. I suppose this is often how things go when a culturally heterogenous nation of 300 million souls is asked to engage in an unspecified act of universal transcendence.

I was young when the attacks occurred. I don’t remember with the intense clarity of many others what I did or felt that day. And I won’t ask you to walk with me through my memory’s hazy landscape. Why should I? I wasn’t there. I didn’t know anyone there, at least not to my knowledge. Like millions upon millions of other Americans, but unlike the family and friends of the nearly 3,000 who died in the atrocity, I was blessed enough not to have to bear the weight of personal grief. It is not my day.

What I do remember clearly, however, was the political atmosphere that rose from the wreckage and carnage left in New York and Washington. That era of paranoia, claustrophobic suspicion, anger, bloodlust and dull, relentless conformity—that’s the milieu in which I came of age as an American citizen and political observer. It was a deeply unfortunate, dark, sad time. That it could be understood, following the trauma of 9/11, does in no way change the national discourse of that time’s fundamentally ugly character. I am profoundly grateful that we as a nation have, in fits and starts, tried to move on in the 10 years since.

Unfortunately—perhaps predictably—this weekend has been a time of backsliding. Although it is in much meeker, more watered-down form, the mawkish, solipsistic authoritarianism of those years has returned with a quiet vengeance.  It’s clear that, 10 years removed, there still remain a great many things concerning 9/11 about which significant numbers of us are unable or unwilling to acknowledge, opting instead for the escapist comfort of sanctimony, irrationality, and self-pity. If we are to understand comprehension as did Hannah Arendt, as “the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be,” then we remain far, far removed from truly comprehending what happened that day.

At the least, these are the conclusions I’ve drawn following the ongoing brouhaha over Paul Krugman’s post today on the attacks. It’s not a long post. Here it is, in full:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

As is to be expected, Krugman’s straying from the unofficial rules of how one is allowed to express oneself on this “sacred” day has been greeted with a rabid viciousness among denizens of the blogopshere’s far-right. Indeed, it lacks all of the hallmarks of what, supposedly, defines one’s comments about 9/11 as being acceptable: there is no self-conscious paean to the first-responders and others who lost their lives as they tried to save their fellow innocents, there is no call for an ambiguous “coming together” of all of “us,” no stirring assurances that evil is evil and good is good. Most sinfully, Krugman makes not even the slightest effort to further the anesthetizing lie that, somehow, that awful day gave Americans and America itself license to respond however it saw fit, no matter how crude, vengeful, or brutish.

He fails to recognize that all involved that day, most especially our political leaders, were cleansed through the blood of the fallen and reborn anew—not as fallible men, capable of making mistaken or even doing wrong, but as a new class of American warrior-saints, above all criticism; or, as it’s been renamed, “partisanship.”

It’s clear that Krugman has run afoul of various unquestionable, consoling fairy-tales and myths. Not from the far-right’s sputtering rage, but rather because of the mealy-mouthed, ethically bankrupt way in which the self-imagined Serious have responded, too. Reading this, I felt as if I were back in 2003, those days of lapel pins and freedom fries, when every mediocrity with an inclination to hear their own voice struggled to be the most sanctimoniously, pompously censorious champion of the conventional wisdom:

In a blog post that went live on The New York Times’ web site just moments before the 10th anniversary of the moment when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Paul Krugman says that the events of September 11, 2001 have been tarnished by the events that occurred afterwards […]

What, exactly, would he have preferred to see to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks? Of course the ceremonies are subdued, we’re talking about marking the day that more than 3,000 people were killed in attacks that we all watched unfold on television. The people they left behind are still around, and many of them didn’t even have a body they could bury. Does Krugman want us to through a big party like the one that erupted outside the White House when Osama bin Laden was killed? Somehow I think not.

I’d also add that Krugman’s designation of Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush as “fake heroes” strikes me as totally off base. I’m no fan of the former President, but there are few people who will or can deny that his leadership in the days and weeks after September 11th was something that history will always remember him positively for […]

The same can be said of Rudy Giuliani, who helped keep New Yorkers united at a time when their city faced a shock unlike anything American city had ever experienced.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a need to look back over the past ten years at the mistakes, the mis-steps, and the price that’s been paid over the past ten years. The retrospective pieces we’ve published here at OTB on the subjects […] were meant to do just that. Additionally, one can look at the Afghan War, and the misguided adventures in Iraq and find much to criticize in the decisions that have been made over the past decade. One can do so, however, without the obvious vitriol and contempt that Krugman displays in his post today.

How could Krugman live with himself, voicing his anger and shame over the actions of this country over these past 10 years, “just moments before the 10th anniversary of the moment when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center”? Why does he hate the victims of 9/11 so? Do you think he even is patriot enough, decent enough, to have memorized all of the minutiae of that nightmare? Does he even know which flight it was, which face of which tower it hit, what read the clock at that very moment? How dare he sully this holy moment with his “vitriol and contempt”? Doesn’t he know that ever wise “history” will surely “remember [Bush] positively”? Who is he to speak up in the face of so much death and sorrow; what does he think—that he knows more than History?

It’s not important that we’re given no proof of how Bush or Giuliani somehow rose to the occasion, like super-men or gladiators, uniting us all. It’s not important whether or not we required the Great Leaders to unite us. History tells us we did, they did. Against the incontrovertible judgment of History, Krugman is nothing. Yes, one might be able to find “much to criticize” in the America’s actions in the 10 years since. One could very well find it worthy of criticism to engage in a war of choice that left more than 100,000 dead and a country in tatters. One could find it worthy of criticism to, 10 years later, remain at war in another country to no clear purpose and with no real end in sight, maintaining a troop presence in the tens of thousands while raining death upon scores of innocents (collateral damage) in pursuit of less than 50 al Qaeda members. One could criticize the systemic implementation of torture, surveillance, indefinite detention, etc.

But there’s no need to react to these potential missteps with anything that might be considered “vitriol” or “contempt” for those that made them or cheered them on in the process. It’s simply a case of, well, “mistakes were made.” Bringing them up today? That’s simple partisan hackery. It’s damn near thought-crime. He clearly doesn’t understand how, 10 years removed, we’ve learned so much.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }