Back when illegal immigration was a club for Paul Krugman to use against George W. Bush he made arguments he's now trying to hide

Many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration, especially from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. ...

It’s intellectually dishonest to say, as Bush does, that immigrants do ‘jobs that Americans will not do.’ The willingness to do a job depends on how much that job pays, and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

More in Krugman vs. Krugman: New York Times columnist tries to memory-hole his prior views on immigration by Michael Lind

Two consecutive quarters of negative Joe Biden GDP followed by a third projected to come in at less than 1% and Paul Krugman is worried about some other Zombie

 

Why Zombie Reaganomics Still Rules the GOP

 

Paul Krugman, New York Times

The Deep State? It exists, and it's a good thing, too, says Nobel Prize Winner and NYT columnist

The New York Times' Paul Krugman: No anti-Semitic enemies to the left, only to the right!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

What a douche bag, writing for a douche rag.

Investors Business Daily thinks no one noticed Obama's recent public embrace of Bernie's radical socialism

Here.

We noticed. We just didn't mention it because we've been pointing out Obama's socialism for nine years already. Yawn.

But Obama was only a fair weather friend of socialism for most of that time because most of the Democrat Party remained neoliberal. Nothing points up his lackluster leadership and servile character throughout that time better than his constant fear of a backlash from the neoliberal wing of a party he supposedly led. Actually it led him. Obama was relieved to wash his hands of the economic crisis and delegated fixing it to Bill Clinton's neoliberal retreads. The guy couldn't even take the socialist baton of Pelosi's single payer plan for crying out loud, or embrace a Paul Krugman approved properly sized stimulus spending bill. And making the Bush tax cuts permanent? That was hardly the work of the leader (in his head) of world socialism.

Freed from the strictures of politics, Obama is now free to advance his fanciful sympathies without consequences, as long as the wind is blowing in that direction. My guess is the left wing of his party sees this as nothing more than his feeble attempt to be relevant again when to them he had already become an object of contempt by the end of 2009.

The author of Dreams from My Father is just dreamin', that's all. All he ever did.

The superstitious George Packer of The New Yorker imagines that the 2009 stimulus which PASSED failed because Republicans put a hex on it

Proving that it isn't just George Will who suffers from the disease. As Paul Krugman pointed out at the time, the stimulus simply wasn't big enough.

It never is.

Here is Packer:

In February, 2009, with the economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month, Congress passed a stimulus bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts, aid to states, and infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists of every persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not a single Republican member of the House. Rather than help save the economy that their party had done so much to wreck, Republicans, led by Senator Mitch McConnell, chose to oppose every Democratic measure, including Wall Street reform. In doing so, they would impede the recovery and let the other party take the fall. It was a brilliantly immoral strategy, and it pretty much worked.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Paul Krugman fan club says "Bon Voyage!"

As usual Paul Krugman is full of crap about Republicans and jobs

Here:

"[P]rivate-sector employment is eight million higher than it was when Barack Obama took office, twice the job gains achieved under his predecessor before the recession struck."

When Barack Obama took office, W-2 employment stood at 155.4 million, and promptly fell 4.5 million. At the end of 2014 it stands at 158.2 million, 2.8 million higher than at the end of 2008, not 8 million higher.

At the same point in his presidency, George W. Bush had added 5.8 million W-2 jobs, and 7.3 million by the end of it.

Paul Krugman, comedian: The Danes aren't melancholy

Here:

'Nor are the Danes melancholy: Denmark ranks at or near the top on international comparisons of “life satisfaction.”'

Denmark also ranks at or near the top for antidepressant use. 

(chart source)

If Obama had wanted to "rescue" the economy in 2009, he should have ramped-up the wars as he's doing now

If Obama had really wanted to rescue the economy in 2009, he would have ramped up dramatically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of putting them on the path to euthanasia. In this sense he was a very bad Keynesian who made FDR spin in his grave.

Of course, that assumes he is smart enough to understand Keynesianism, being raised as a doctrinaire Marxist who was content to bask lazily in the glow of his presidential victory while a bunch of Clinton re-treads did their mediocre best for him . . . recreating HillaryCare. A more sinister interpretation believes that the inattention to the economy was all on purpose, since suppressing the middle class is the main objective of revolutionary leftism faced with successful capitalism almost everywhere. Still others simply chalk it up to Obama's incompetence, just another example of the Affirmative Action Presidency at work.

But I digress.

The simple reason for the need to have ramped up the wars back in 2009 is that the radical stimulus spending called for by the likes of Paul Krugman (3x what Obama ended up spending), who ridiculed the smallness of Obama's stimulus spending plan in The New York Times here, cannot be accomplished quickly through any other department of the federal government except through what we used to call more accurately The War Department. 'There are only a limited number of “shovel-ready” public investment projects — that is, projects that can be started quickly enough to help the economy in the near term,' Krugman wrote at the time.

That's for sure.

Proof of this can now be seen in the GDP numbers in just the last year when ISIS all of a sudden became a threat on the administration's radar screen even though ISIS had been building in the open for years and the administration actually had been warned about it and knew about it.

Federal government consumption had been a net negative subtraction from GDP for each of the last three years, 2011-2013, totaling -0.28 points of GDP for each year on average, and 75% of that came on average from cutting spending on National Defense.

All of that changed on a dime in 3Q2014 when ISIS surged into Iraq. Consumption on national defense suddenly vaulted to +0.69 points of GDP from +0.12 points in 1Q and -0.07 points in 2Q, to the point where defense spending now represents fully 97% of the federal contribution to GDP in the third quarter of 2014, and over 13% of GDP overall. All the current big contributors to GDP come in lower than this except for exports, with which defense spending is tied. 

Only the military can spend large sums of government money quickly in this slow-moving, inertia-plagued bureaucratic state. Future presidents, take note: War is still the father of everything.

Climate-change activists are exasperated beyond endurance by the gullibility of the people

So says Clive Crook for Bloombergview here.

It illustrates a more general point, that the vision of the anointed is always frustrated by the lumpenproletariat. The elites' response to them is sometimes hyperbolic, as in Lenin's recourse to a vanguard to foist the revolution on a less than enthusiastic population, or as in a certain Penn State climate scientist's recourse to the courts to shut down his critics.

Old Clive doesn't mention those, but he does mention Secretary of State John Kerry's kooky statements, and adds this:

[T]his cause isn't advanced by exaggerating what is known in order to scare people into action, nor by denouncing everybody who disagrees with such proposals as evil or idiotic.

The scientists themselves -- some of them, at least -- are partly to blame. They chose to become political advocates, no doubt out of a sincere belief that policies needed to change a lot and at once. But scientist-advocates can't expect to be seen as objective or disinterested. Once they're suspected of spinning the science or opining on questions outside their area of expertise, as political advocacy is bound to require, they lose authority.

I'd say Clive is definitely showing signs of mellowing since his association with Bloomberg. Before that he seemed less temperate, although too temperate for Paul Krugman.

The incremental change of good old Fabian socialism is what Clive seems to have settled on, as has Obama after an early explosion of revolutionary zeal in 2008 when the realities of office overwhelmed everything.

Fortunately for those of us who disagree about the climate alarums, the John Kerrys and Penn Staters don't seem to have received the memo and keep doing everything to hurt their cause.  

I'll Believe In The Liberals' Idea Of Equal Dignity Of Work When Paul Krugman Gets Paid To Scrub Toilets

Here he is in all his liberal splendor, refusing to grant the dignity he demands:

It’s all very well to talk in the abstract about the dignity of work, but to suggest that workers can have equal dignity despite huge inequality in pay is just silly. In 2012, the top 40 hedge fund managers and traders were paid a combined $16.7 billion, equivalent to the wages of 400,000 ordinary workers. Given that kind of disparity, can anyone really believe in the equal dignity of work?

-------------------------------------

I'll spell it out for you: if your dignity depends on how much you make rather than on doing your job, whatever it is, well, then you will never have any dignity.

Yes, there is dignity of work, but only if work is done well. The real indignity accrues to those who do not value the work of others, however humble, and imagine that they are better because of what they do and how much they make.

The Nation: Bill Clinton Wrecked The Economy, Not David Stockman

So Robert Sheer, here:

It wasn’t Stockman who wrecked the economy. It was Bill Clinton who deregulated the too-big-to-fail banks, and it was George W. Bush and Barack Obama who bailed them out. But even Paul Krugman, who knows how bad things are and yet manages to be charitable in appraisals of his Princeton colleague Ben Bernanke, dismisses Stockman’s critique as “cranky old man stuff. ...” ...

Herein is a lesson that the bankers should have been taught back during the Clinton presidency when, as Stockman writes, the principle of a bailout for Wall Street’s hustlers “was reinforced by the Fed’s unforgivable 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.”

That fiasco’s enablers—Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers—and the more disastrous ones to follow were crowned “The Committee to Save the World” on Time magazine’s Feb. 15, 1999, cover and are still welcomed in those polite circles where truth-teller Stockman is being treated as a pariah.

Paul Krugman Really Wants To Increase Taxes On The Middle Class

Fair taxation looks like the rates of the 1950s, says Paul Krugman, here:

"America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share."

What he's not telling you, however, is that America made the poor pay their "fair share" too in the 1950s, which today they are not doing. Even liberals agree 47% of the American people today don't pay any income taxes whatsoever. But at the 1950s rates, nearly 60% of today's workers, almost 90 million out of 151 million total American workers, would actually be paying income taxes, and paying income taxes big time, at a marginal rate of 20% instead of the low Bush rates of 10% and 15%, if they pay any income taxes at all.

Can you say, "Big middle class tax increase if Krugman got his way"?

The tax rates Krugman refers to come from the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. If those rates were in effect today, the rich at Obama's beloved $200,000 a year level would be in the 59% bracket instead of in his 39.5% bracket, which makes Obama look like not simply a conservative by comparison with Krugman, but a reactionary by comparison with Bill Clinton.

More to the point, under Truman's rates in 1952 applied to today "the rich" would be in the 66% bracket. So high marginal tax rates on "the rich" actually came down from 66% under Truman to 59% under Eisenhower. Krugman is disingenous in portraying 1950s rates as some draconian trend to punish the rich when in fact Eisenhower was practicing the art of the possible in his time, trying to lower taxation while still trying to pay off the massive debt accumulated during World War II. Compare that to today when the chief liberal sticking point on taxes is the difference between the top marginal rate under Bush of 35% and the top marginal rate under Clinton of 39.5%.

Almost never was so much made of so little.

One critical difference between Obama's stated position and Paul Krugman's, however, is that while the president's marginal rate of 39.5% would remain the last rate on the ladder, Krugman would expand the ladder with additional marginal rates all the way up to 91% as was done in the Revenue Code of 1954.

Only a fanatic would think that that's part of what's possible today. Not even Obama thinks that.

Yet.

Larry Kudlow Slanders Christ On His Radio Program

Larry Kudlow, former Democrat, member of SDS, drug addict and alcoholic, and supposedly a Jewish convert to Christianity, slandered Christ in the final hour of his radio program yesterday. That's a lot of "formers".

He did so while attacking Paul Krugman for advocating that the Bush tax cuts be allowed to expire as a remedy for the fiscal cliff, ridiculing the idea with the ever popular provincialism "for Christ's sake".

Obviously the defeat of Mitt Romney has pushed all of Kudlow's buttons at once. He began the program with a full-throated denunciation of the Pat Buchanan wing of the Republican Party and its anti-amnesty stance on illegal immigrants, saying it must be "crushed".

You can take the man out of the SDS, but you can't take the SDS out of the man.

You can not hear a podcast of Kudlow's program anytime you don't want to, here.

High Tariffs Allowed Domestic Producers To Get Really Rich Off Captive Consumers

So says John Steele Gordon, who provides a short history of taxation for The Wall Street Journal, here:

After the Civil War, nearly all the wartime taxes—including the nation's first income tax—were repealed and the federal government relied mostly on the tariff for revenues. It provided the government with more than ample peacetime income. In 1882, the government had revenues of $403 million, but expenses were only $257 million, a staggering budget surplus of nearly 36%. The reason the tariff was so high was, ostensibly, to protect America's burgeoning industries from foreign competition.

Of course, the owners of those burgeoning industries—i.e., the rich—were greatly helped by the protection, which enabled them to charge higher prices and make greater profits than if they had had to face unbridled foreign competition.

But the tariff is a consumption tax, which is simply added to the price of the goods sold. And consumption taxes are inherently regressive.

Which ought to get more attention on the right when one considers that liberals like Paul Krugman, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and so-called conservatives like Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney all seem to like consumption taxes in one form or another.

The move would raise more revenues off the rank and file, and preserve the fortunes of the rich, which is why so many politicians support them. The better to eat you with, my dear.

Capitalism Hasn't Failed in America. It Just Hasn't Been Tried For A While.

So says Chris Whalen here, in reply to Roubini:

[D]espite America’s pretensions to being a free market, democratic society, the Marxian world view won the battle for ideas in the 20th Century. The New Deal and Great Society efforts to increase the scope of government in America all stem from the socialist ideas of FDR and his political heirs in both parties.

Which explains, among other things, Paul Krugman.

Obama Plays 'You Choose' at The Washington Post: How Obama Can Default on Treasuries to Hurt His Enemies and Help His Friends, and Get Re-elected

I'm drinking gin on a hot Saturday afternoon, putting on my 'Evil Obama' hat and playing 'You Choose' here at The Washington Post.

Imagine you are Obama.

You want to transform America into a European socialist welfare state. The Republicans are standing in your way. They want to freeze the debt ceiling where it is to deprive you of the opportunity to follow through with your dramatic spending increases, which have tripled the annual budget deficits.

The monthly revenue stream will leave you short by something around $125 billion on average without the freedom to sell new debt.

The people who will vote for you need to get their money in a government shutdown.

The people who will not vote for you anyway must not get theirs.

You'll make your choices, and when your enemies complain they're not getting their dough, you can plausibly blame the Republicans for tying your hands.

In the process you can destroy the full faith and credit of the United States and cut her down to size, and finish the (crony) capitalists once and for all.

You can end the wars and bring home the troops (saving tons of money and improving your popularity at the same time).

You can tank the economy and get sweeping powers to spend the trillions of dollars Paul Krugman wanted you to spend in the first place (on people who will vote for you).

Does he have the guts? Or does he just want to play golf for the rest of his life?

GDP Revisions Beg The Question: Did Obama Really Avert a Depression?

I don't see how anyone can believe that nonsense.

GDP 2008: - 0.3 percent

GDP 2009: - 3.5 percent

GDP 2010: +3.0 percent

There's a nice summary here.

Despite the unprecedented way in which George Bush and then Barack Obama jettisoned capitalism, unleashing torrents of bailouts, credit and federal manipulation during the market meltdown in 2008 and 2009, GDP ended up posting back to back years of negative growth anyway.

When you have back to back quarters of negative growth, they call it a recession.

When you have back to back years of negative growth, they call it a depression.

We had a depression.

One can plausibly argue that 2010's + 3.0 percent GDP imprint is evidence that the federal deluge got us out of the depression, but it didn't avert it. We had a depression. We spent gobs to get out of it. And now for the first half of 2011 GDP is stalled at 0.4 and now 1.3, jobs aren't coming back, housing continues to sink, prices of essentials are rising, kai ta loipa.

Krugman and company thought we didn't spend anywhere near enough to get out. Well, we did, just not enough to get Obama out to 2012, that's all!

A quick, dirty depression arguably would have been better. Instead, we've got this, including a nasty argument about paying for all the borrowing to finance it.

Even Bruce Bartlett Admits We're in a Depression

Here, where the 1930s is the interpretive lens through which he seems to see everything, including the prospect of fiscal and monetary tightening. Evidently he prefers a looser sphincter.

Is this former Republican sleeping with Paul Krugman?