char·la·tan (shärl-tn) n.
1. A person who makes elaborate, fraudulent, and often voluble claims to skill or knowledge; a quack or fraud.
2. someone who professes knowledge or expertise, esp in medicine, that he does not have; quack
A Nobel prize-winning Ivy league educated economist advocating “kicking the can down the road”. No, it’s real. This would be funny if people didn’t take Krugman seriously. This article actually appeared in the liberal rag NYT. It’s hard to believe the the criminals in Washington listen to this charlatan, but they do. We are doomed.
Paul Krugman: “We Should Kick The Can Down The Road. It’s The Responsible Thing To Do”
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/09/2013
The below article, recreated in its grotesque entirety, is a real, serious Op-Ed written by a supposedly real, non page-view trolling, Nobel-prize winning economist, in a serious paper, the New York Times. It can be classified with one word: jaw-dropping.
We can only hope that some time in the next five years, when the global economy is in ashes following the implosion of the final central bank bubble, that the US department of injustice will prosecute authors of such drivel (and all those sell-side analysts who have had Buy recommendations in the 2009-2013 period) with the same ferocity it has demonstrated toward those US-downgrading rating agencies, which are now supposed to be solely accountable for the Second Great Depression and the $30 trillion or so in misallocated capital in the past five years.
Kick That Can
By Paul Krugman
John Boehner, the speaker of the House, claims to be exasperated. “At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,” he said Wednesday. “I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough of it. It’s time to act.”
Actually, Mr. Boehner needs to refresh his memory. During the first decade of his time in Congress, the U.S. government was doing just fine on the fiscal front. In particular, the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P. was a third lower when Bill Clinton left office than it was when he came in. It was only when George W. Bush arrived and squandered the Clinton surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars that the budget outlook began deteriorating again.
But that’s a secondary issue. The key point is this: While it’s true that we will eventually need some combination of revenue increases and spending cuts to rein in the growth of U.S. government debt, now is very much not the time to act. Given the state we’re in, it would be irresponsible and destructive not to kick that can down the road.
Start with a basic point: Slashing government spending destroys jobs and causes the economy to shrink. (absolutely wrong and incorrect, cutting government spending put money back into the “real economy”).
This really isn’t a debatable proposition at this point. The contractionary effects of fiscal austerity have been demonstrated by study after study and overwhelmingly confirmed by recent experience — for example, by the severe and continuing slump in Ireland, which was for a while touted as a shining example of responsible policy, or by the way the Cameron government’s turn to austerity derailed recovery in Britain.
Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing.
Still, won’t spending cuts (or tax increases) cost jobs whenever they take place, so we might as well bite the bullet now? The answer is no — given the state of our economy, this is a uniquely bad time for austerity.
One way to see this is to compare today’s economic situation with the environment prevailing during an earlier round of defense cuts: the big winding down of military spending in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the end of the cold war. Those spending cuts destroyed jobs, too, with especially severe consequences in places like southern California that relied heavily on defense contracts. At the national level, however, the effects were softened by monetary policy: the Federal Reserve cut interest rates more or less in tandem with the spending cuts, helping to boost private spending and minimize the overall adverse effect.
Today, by contrast, we’re still living in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the Fed, in its effort to fight the slump, has already cut interest rates as far as it can — basically to zero. So the Fed can’t blunt the job-destroying effects of spending cuts, which would hit with full force.
The point, again, is that now is very much not the time to act; fiscal austerity should wait until the economy has recovered, and the Fed can once again cushion the impact.
But aren’t we facing a fiscal crisis? No, not at all. The federal government can borrow more cheaply than at almost any point in history, and medium-term forecasts, like the 10-year projections released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, are distinctly not alarming (or accurate). Yes, there’s a long-term fiscal problem, but it’s not urgent that we resolve that long-term problem right now. The alleged fiscal crisis exists only in the minds of Beltway insiders (never mind the $16.4 trillion debt).
Still, even if we should put off spending cuts for now, wouldn’t it be a good thing if our politicians could simultaneously agree on a long-term fiscal plan? Indeed, it would. It would also be a good thing if we had peace on earth and universal marital fidelity. In the real world, Republican senators are saying that the situation is desperate — but not desperate enough to justify even a penny in additional taxes. Do these sound like men ready and willing to reach a grand fiscal bargain?
Realistically, we’re not going to resolve our long-run fiscal issues any time soon, which is O.K. — not ideal, but nothing terrible will happen if we don’t fix everything this year. Meanwhile, we face the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts.
So we should avoid that damage by kicking the can down the road. It’s the responsible thing to do.
AWD says:
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9th February 2013 at 9:04 pm
TJF says:
Krugman really can’t be as stupid as he acts. I have believed for years that he just says what the masters want him to say. I really can’t imagine he believes much of anything that he writes or says. On the other hand, he very well may just be an idiot.
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9th February 2013 at 9:16 pm
sangell says:
Charles Hugh Smith the past week pointed me to this fascinating article by Ron Unz who was, back when we still had a choice, a conservative candidate for Governor. I supported him then because I was appalled at the direction Pete Wilson, the incumbent Governor was taking the state. How I would love to have Pete Wilson, with all his faults back but that is yesterday. Unz, in this lengthy article touches on the reason why.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
We have had the critical institutions of America come under the control of a Jewocracy. The Ivy League has seized control of the United States and liberal Jews have seized control of the Ivy League. Forget the Bilderbergers, the CFR, the Rothchilds and all the other tin foil hat conspiracies. In modern America there is only one and it is not even decided anymore by merit. It is decided by religion. The Jews have seized the critical institutions of the United States and not just any Jews,Ron Unz is himself a Harvard educated Jew who exposes the problem.
Jews are overrepresented in our elite institutions by. according to Unz, a factor of 10. By any valid measure of admission to Harvard, Yale or Princeton ( which Unz describes as the elite, though I’d through in Dartmouth and Stanford) Asians should have 3/4 of Jewish admissions, they don’t. The reason they don’t is because Jews are using their position in American society to practice Ku Klux Klanish admission policies to the upper echelons of American society.
I was shocked to see how well Unz documents this. The American Jewish community, though supposedly the best educated and most affluent ethnic group in America has, apparently emulated the American negro, but with far less justification, in a blind vendetta against WASP exclusionary practices of 3 generations ago to the point that they have placed their very existance in jeopardy. If what Unz exposes in this article should ever become widely known I fear the American Jew could become smoke just as the European Jew did.
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9th February 2013 at 11:29 pm
tom says:
WTF??!!! This is insane
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9th February 2013 at 7:31 am
napari says:
Prejudice and biased people who wish to take a crap will post as references lenthy complicated articles that 1. Would take 1-2 hours to read and comprehend and 2. Take hours to back check the foot notes for accuracy.
What sangell’s post does is allow him to use an article to make his prejudice comments of his own interpretation against one race and the flow of The Burning Platform runs the comment into past history fairly quickly.
So I appeal to sane people to realize that a prejudiced, biased, idiot continues a campaign of bullshit.
sangell….blow me!
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9th February 2013 at 9:38 am
flash says:
truly, the only option left is to kick that can. The other is shut down the printing press and watch it all go bang which will inevitably happen, only not vulgarity….print , print against the dying light….
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-real-employment-picture.html
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9th February 2013 at 9:39 am
sensetti says:
That’s it Flash !
The day the printing press stops is the day the Free Shit Army burns the place to the ground
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9th February 2013 at 9:49 am
flash says:
“only not vulgarity” I thought I typed voluntarily, but never mind , WP knows best what I really meant to skype.
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9th February 2013 at 10:16 am
sangell says:
@Napari
It is often the case that controversial issues require the reading of lengthy explanations particularly when it involves protected minorities. However, there is little doubt that Jews are overrepresented at Harvard and other Ivy league schools. That is not in dispute. 25% of the Harvard student body is Jewish whereas they comprise 1.8% of the US college age population. That might not be controversial IF Jews were being admitted on the basis of merit but that is what Ron Unz’s article reveals. Asians and non Jewish whites with higher academic qualifications are being excluded so as to preserve the Jewish ‘quota’ at these elite schools.
From Unz’s article.
“Furthermore, the Harvard enrollment changes over the last decade have been even more unusual when we compare them to changes in the underlying demographics. Between 2000 and 2011, the relative percentage of college-age blacks enrolled at Harvard dropped by 18 percent, along with declines of 13 percent for Asians and 11 percent for Hispanics, while only whites increased, expanding their relative enrollment by 16 percent. However, this is merely an optical illusion: in fact, the figure for non-Jewish whites slightly declined, while the relative enrollment of Jews increased by over 35 percent, probably reaching the highest level in Harvard’s entire history. Thus, the relative presence of Jews rose sharply while that of all other groups declined, and this occurred during exactly the period when the once-remarkable academic performance of Jewish high school students seemed to suddenly collapse.”
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9th February 2013 at 10:26 am
napari says:
Sangell
I went straight to the foot notes. Some were references to the authors own previous articles. Some were references to the authors own books. Some were articles by the NYT and the WA Post…. One reference was a dead end to nowhere. Some weren’t even links! One would have to research the references for a week to even try to make sense of said references.
I happen to think the author was entirely self serving and you misinterpreted the article to suit your personal discriminating prejudice against one race.
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9th February 2013 at 11:15 am
Administrator says:
Sangell
Please explain the high level of Jewish students at Syracuse University, Tulane, Emory, Univ of Denver, Maryland.
http://inlikeme.com/jewish-students-at-colleges-universities/
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9th February 2013 at 11:55 am
Eddie says:
High levels of Jewish students….I’d guess that it’s a direct result of what Levitt and Dubner found and published in Freakonomics. Jewish lawyers have (through a rather interesting series of circumstances) become very powerful in the world of corporate finance. This has resulted in lots of money and power being directed at helping Jewish young people get a leg up in the world. it’s not a conspiracy. As we say in Texas, money talks, and bullshit walks.
As far as Krugman’s never-ending one verse song…we have a saying for that too. It is this:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.
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9th February 2013 at 12:11 pm
sangell says:
Unz himself admits admissions data ( and criterion) at elite universities are cloudy at best and concealed at worst. As he himself admits certain percentages can only be gleaned by rough approximations. A Cohen is unlikely to be a Korean or Protestant but could, in fact, be a Korean kid adopted by a Jewish family and whose to say what religion a person actually practices. Still, because of the decline in Jewish academic achievement both absolutely and in relation to other ethnic groups the continued outsized admission of Jewish students into our premier schools is disturbing to say the least.
My real objection is not so much to who attends these schools. I don’t think they are really that much better than other top US universities in terms of academics. What they really offer is access to the top level of US political power. Since 1988 every US president has attended either Harvard or Yale. Our judiciary is top heavy with graduates from Ivy league law schools as is the Senior Executive Service of the Federal government.
While American business as a whole comes from varied backgrounds, in fact, the Ivy League is not especially well represented in the real economy of this nation, the Wall St parasite economy draws heavily from the Ivy League with predictable results. Outsized compensation, revolving doors between Washington and multimillion dollar sinecures at Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, etc and policies that transfer the wealth of this country to the institutions the Ivy Leaguers have seized control of. If they were doing a good job of running the country the public might not care but they aren’t and more and more people are becoming aware of just how interconnected this gang is and how malevolent their influence is.
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9th February 2013 at 12:18 pm
sangell says:
@administrator
I can give you an answer as to the heavy Jewish enrollment at those schools but I don’t think you’d like it but, with the exception of Maryland, they are all private and the answer lies in their presidents and boards of trustees.
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9th February 2013 at 2:23 pm
Administrator says:
Could it happen to be that they are smarter than the average white dullards?
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9th February 2013 at 2:35 pm
napari says:
@sangell…I apologize for flying off the handle at your posted comment. After doing more research Robert Unz is more credible than I thought and you were making a point nothing more.
@admin…I have been enraged at some of the past comments on TBP and over reacted. I would also like to apologize to you for letting my temper get the best of me and will endeavor not to post anymore bull crap.
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9th February 2013 at 8:55 am
Administrator says:
napari
The first rule of TBP is never to apologize. The shit throwing monkeys sense weakness and will attack.
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9th February 2013 at 9:26 am
flash says:
@admin …damn newbies always trying to suck up to the big man.
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9th February 2013 at 9:29 am
Eddie says:
It’s the new, kinder, gentler TBP.
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9th February 2013 at 9:40 am
napari says:
I happen to be a fan of admin for 2-3 years now. I liked his articles and what TBP in my perspective stood for….an alternative news source!
I never like knee jerking and wrongly accusing people and i especially dont like taking away from the better bloggers who know how to write.
I just popped my cork at the jew this and jew that crap. It does have a fan base that I think is misguided but nothing I say will change those minds.
Onward bound…
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9th February 2013 at 10:18 am
sangell says:
@napari
I agree my initial post was over the top but I was fresh from reading Unz’s lengthy article and downing a few Jim Beam’s during the reading. That said, it is very dangerous for Jews to use the positions of leadership they hold in the Ivy League to practice the very exclusionary policies they once fought. There is little doubt that Asians in particular, and white christians to a lesser extent, are being denied admission to Ivy League schools to make space available to other, less qualified candidates.
It is not the job of college admissions departments to pick the winners and losers in our society even at private universities. A student who can score 1500 on an SAT exam is going to be able to be admitted to a good school somewhere but we all know that a degree from the Ivy League has a status about it that enables its possessor to open doors others may struggle to get through. It is also likely that not just ethnic exclusion but ideological exclusion takes place in admissions policies. A student who mentions on his application to Yale or Harvard that amongst his activities he was a volunteer campaign worker for Obama is likely to get credit for that. Were he to say he did the same for Governor Perry his application might head to the waste paper basket at that point.
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9th February 2013 at 11:43 am