About AJ DiCintio
A.J. DiCintio is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on
the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up.
Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and
polished by experience, to social/political affairs.
Paul Krugman is all in a worried sweat
that America is "on its way to becoming a boiled frog” — that is, the
mythical boiled frog that he correctly identifies as a "useful metaphor for
a very real problem [which is] the difficulty of responding to disasters
that creep up on you a bit at a time.”
Alas, this particular metaphor may have caused one or two impulsive
folks on Main Street to shout a robust "hooray” that Professor Krugman
has come to his senses and joined the great majority of Americans on the
right and in the center who have, since the sixties, believed that a
number of social, political, and economic disasters have insidiously
been creeping up on the nation.
The rest of us, however, held off on issuing that exclamation of joy;
for we have learned all too well there is often a devil (or a whole mess
of devils) lurking in the details — in this case, details regarding
Krugman’s take on the nation’s economic policy.
And devils there are; for we learn that to avoid betraying "The
Revolution,” the far-left Nobel Prize winning economist, Princeton
professor, and NY Times columnist isn’t above employing the propaganda
technique called card stacking.
To make the point, let’s being with Krugman’s characterization of "the
Obama stimulus plan” as a "fairly strong policy response” to the
economic crisis.
Yes, it certainly is correct to use the term "Obama stimulus” because
the buck stops with the man who signed the bill into law.
But after that bit of honesty, the propaganda begins as Krugman never
mentions that Obama’s "plan” consisted of turning the writing of the
bill over to Congress, where Pelosi, Reid, and other self-important,
self-serving politicians who were determined never to "waste a good
crisis” hastily dumped a Democratic Wish List of rotten pork into the
congressional meat grinder to produce an abomination that has as much
chance (zero) of creating "3.5 million jobs” as it has of producing a
multiplier effect of "1.5” times the 787 billion dollars it borrows,
spends, and wastes.
The professor is just as duplicitous when he praises the bill as a
"fairly strong response” to the economic crisis because even in the face
of its current failure, he offers not a word about the following facts:
...A huge amount of the "stimulus” money goes to states to pay for
Medicaid, unemployment insurance costs, and other transfer payments that
create not a single new job.
...The bill’s enormous price tag, when added to the trillions Obama
proposes to borrow to "perfect this nation,” will cost jobs as
economic growth is suppressed in a debt encumbered United States.
We come now to the Big Disaster currently disturbing Sweden’s favorite
economist:
Paul Krugman worries that like the frog that is oblivious to the danger
surrounding it, neither the Obama administration nor Congress "is
showing any inclination ...to get another round of fiscal stimulus under
way very soon” to avert an apparent jobless recovery.
"Another round of fiscal stimulus” from Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al.? Talk
about being faithful to the dogmas of the Liberal Church!
And faithful Krugman is to a fault, actually, to a gigantic fault,
explaining why he has nothing to say about the work of Robert Barro, the
Harvard professor who has studied the effects of government outlays
during the thirties and the years of WWII, the "mother” of all periods
that have seen great increases in public spending and borrowing.
After he explains why "the war-based multiplier of 0.8 substantially
overstates the multiplier that applies to peacetime government
purchases,” Barro goes on to say this about his research:
In any event, when I attempted to estimate directly the multiplier
associated with peacetime government purchases, I got a number
insignificantly different from zero. ("Government Spending Is No
Free Lunch,” WSJ, January 22, 2009.)
"A number insignificantly different from zero” — How profound that
statement becomes when we consider that in addition to its message of
"no multiplier effect” from Obama’s corrupt, embarrassingly ineffective
"stimulus” bill, it reminds us that the nation will long bear its burden
of debt service and higher taxes.
Paul "More Is Better” Krugman, however, blithely pushes inconvenient
facts aside as he argues for additional "fiscal stimulus.” But whatever
economic damage occurs as a result of the policies he advocates, he’ll
still have his job at Princeton and his soapbox at the NY Times.
(If Bankruptcy rudely yanks the box from under his feet, he’ll surely be
provided with another by MSNBC, PBS, NPR, Time, or Newsweek — unless
they have awakened to find Bankruptcy summarily yanking everything from
their offices and production centers.)
Ironically, then, it’s the Democrats who may end up as the boiled frog
after the public has had its chance to react to an economic program
based upon the slogan, "Prosperity through astounding borrowing,
astonishing spending, stupendous tax increases, shocking utility bill
explosions, and massive government intervention!”
Now, while that’s a disaster for Barack, Nancy, Harry, and every other
liberal, it’s a boon for the rest of the nation.
