Paul Krugman

Simon Johnson floats what can only be a trial balloon. Meanwhile, Krugman's "agonizing" on whether to support Helicopter Ben or not.

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Yves:

Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal and Krugman, Gruber and non-disclosure issues [Glenn Greenwald]. I was completely gobsmacked by Krugman’s evident lack of a moral compass (this is “ends justify the means” in fancy dress), and was glad to see Greenwald do the heavy lifting of taking his argument apart.

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Paul Krugman is quickly becoming a shadow of his formerly credible self. For the love of Jeebus, Paul, stop talking about health reform before you become as much of a joke as paid propagandists Keith Obamaman or Rachel Maddow.
Here's the sentence that really stuck in my craw:

A last general point: we really don’t know what it will take to rein in health costs, but that’s a reason to try every plausible idea that experts have proposed. Limiting tax deductibility is definitely one of those ideas.

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Who needs Princeton* and Chicago** when we've got UMKC***? It's Sunday morning, so I'll grab a money quote from Bill Black's three part series, but read parts one and two. They describe what we're up against: Theft, plain and simple, and demonstrable at law if the perps were brought before a court. Read below the fold...

Krugman asks, and answers "politics" (that is, right wing bromides like "government is the problem"). Of course:

1. Obama hasn't done anything to fight the right wing bromides and has, if anything, reinforced them; and

2. Why would on earth would anybody imagine that the FKDP has any other constituency than Big Money, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and all the other Mr. Bigs? Read below the fold...

Yves on Krugman's column today. She writes:

My big beef is that he didn’t go far enough and is WAAY too forgiving of the motivations and actions of Larry Summers and by extension, Team Obama.

Somebody kidnapped Paul Krugman at that White House dinner, didn't they? Krugman wrote: Read below the fold...

So said Pyrrhus, of the Pyrrhic Victory. And Professor Krugman:

So the odds now are that the [health care reform] thing hangs together, and reform is indeed enacted this year. It will be a highly flawed product; we’ll probably spend much of the next decade trying to fix it.

But it does look as if it’s going to happen. And that will be a huge victory for ["]progressives["].

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Nobelist All-Star Celebrity Cage Death Match! I always did enjoy an intellectual splatterfest, and I know who I'm rooting for: Salt Water (Princeton; MIT) vs. Fresh Water (Chicago).

But what next?

The "Tapwater Economists" rehabilitate the labor theory of value? Read below the fold...

Paul Krugman today lays it all out: how Big Government has been what has stood between us and a 1930s-style Great Depression (even as he acknowledges that they could have done a better job of it). Some excerpts: (but read the whole thing!)

I heard you say that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression. What saved us?

The answer, basically, is Big Government.

So the government fixed things? Does everyone go back to work tomorrow?

Just to be clear: the economic situation remains terrible. We haven’t yet reached the point at which things are actually improving; for now, all we have to celebrate are indications that things are getting worse more slowly.

[...]

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Krugman explains. [Note: two posts]

You really must see his chart. It's my new second-favorite chart, after this one.

Sarah asked about this awhile ago. Maybe he saw her post? ;-) Read below the fold...

Paul Krugman explains single payer. Under the headline -- get this:

Irresponsible punditry

I'm with Cohen on this one. That's a FAIL.

In fact, two FAILs. One for the late date; the second for the complete lack of awareness that the date is late. Read below the fold...

Krugman has finally broken his silence on HR 676:

1. If I could start from scratch, I’d go for single-payer. Where introducing single-payer has proved politically possible, it’s been a smashing success.

2. However, there are other systems that also work well. The Netherlands, for example, relies largely on private insurers, although they’re tightly regulated and there are extensive cross-subsidies. And they have universal care at much lower expense than we do. So single-payer isn’t the unique ideal.

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There's been some buzz about Michael Hirsch's Newsweek essay on why Washington ignores Joseph Stiglitz.

Krugman chimes in to disagree and he seems to be getting his shrill back, just a bit:

But the larger story is the absence of a progressive-economist wing. A lot of people supported Obama over Clinton in the primaries because they thought Clinton would bring back the Rubin team; and what Obama has done is … bring back the Rubin team. Even the advisory council, which is supposed to bring in skeptical views, does so by bringing in, um, Marty Feldstein.

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After I read this horrific story in the Times about Obama selling out even the public option (Bloomberg has the same story), I went look at Krugman's blog -- since Krugman believes, correctly, that you can't reform health care without conflict -- and found Krugman got there f Read below the fold...

Can anyone guess what they are? Read below the fold...