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AJ DiCintio

Paul Krugman, Politician
July 13, 2010

Paul Krugman has had all the advantages.

For example, he's a Yale man — Thurston Howell III's opinion about Yalies notwithstanding because among its other excellences, Yale offers its students the opportunity to learn that the world’s greatest creative spirits have been properly brutal in their estimate of politicians.

For instance, attentive Elis should know that the playwrights of ancient Greece heaped unspeakable tragedies on the heads and hearts of the most important politicians — though Sophocles et al. did allow that the hubris-infected big shots might return to favor among the gods if they accepted their punishment with humility and understanding.

Yale grads ought to know, too, that Dante and Shakespeare were not so kind, the former depicting politicians as prime candidates to suffer the hellish, eternal pain of the inferno and the latter regarding them as so profoundly incapable of redemption (or today’s "rehabilitation”) that he ended his plays by littering the stage with their bodies.

Yes, Yale men and women should know what great writers have always said about politicians, including the vitriol penned by satirists such as Juvenal, Swift, and Twain.

Perhaps, however, they don’t because for decades on end our colleges and universities have been exempting liberal/leftist politicians from truths written and spoken since antiquity.

(Anita Dunn, Obama’s former interim communications director and campaign "senior advisor,” is no professor. But she did her best to promulgate The Liberal View of Politicians when in June of ’09 she told graduates of St. Andrew’s prep school outside Washington that she considers the madman monster, mass murderer, and obese human rights hater Mao Zedong one of her "favorite political philosophers.”)

But whatever Paul Krugman learned or didn’t learn as a student, the fact remains that he could have chosen the career of honest, sensible economist (to the extent such a feat is possible for practitioners of the "dismal science”).

However, he didn’t, opting, instead, to become a politician economist, with all the ugliness the choice entails.

(How’s that for proving that advantage alone doesn’t even come close to making the man.)

Here’s the evidence:

Anyone who’s been reading Krugman lately knows he’s been relentlessly calling for enormous government borrowing and spending as the only true avenue to economic recovery.

In fact, the Princeton professor wanted the $800 billion slab of rancid, earmarked pork that is the "stimulus bill” to weigh in at over a trillion dollars, perhaps $1.2 trillion.

And today he certainly favors more "stimulus,” even in the form of welfare to states such as California, Illinois, and New York, all of which face astonishing deficits — through no fault of their own, according to liberal dogma.

In fact, Krugman gets so excited about the benefits of a nation’s borrowing its way out of hard times he recently gushed that "the long-term cost of servicing an extra trillion dollars of borrowing is [only] $17.5 billion,” as if the amount is a one-time cost (it’s annual and likely to last forever) and as if there’s no further price to be paid for the "inflation-protected” government bonds he expects China to buy.

Moreover, he has condemned Western European nations as Ultimate Scrooges for not increasing their borrowing and spending even though their citizens are straining to keep their noses above an existing ocean of national debt that reaches just to (and at times into) their nostrils.

However, while Krugman has called for huge, increased spending literally hundreds of times, he has only several times mentioned the need for fiscal responsibility in the future.

Worse, he speaks in exquisite detail about how much the U.S. ought to borrow and how it should spend the money (some of which initiates permanent government programs); yet he never gets specific about his ideas for what happens when the borrowing must end.

Incredible.

Is it possible a Nobel Prize winning economist finds himself unable to "do the math” regarding how much in tax increases or reductions in government programs will be necessary to put the nation’s fiscal house in order?

Is it possible he is completely flummoxed about the kind of taxes needed and how they will fall on the population?

It is possible he has not a single specific thought about the degree to which the new level of taxation will retard economic growth? Or how it may create a "new normal” in baseline unemployment? Or how it might keep young people living at home with their parents until they are 30 or 35?

Is it possible he cannot calculate the point at which a nation’s debt leads to disaster, a point at which even he declares "not a cent more”?

Is it possible he can’t determine how many dollars China must accumulate before it can purchase the 30 companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average, even as that nation holds sway over American workers and American culture as a result of the U.S. debt it holds?

Of course the answer to those questions is "no.”

Yet not a specific word from him about the size and consequences of the bill that the economic piper always lays on the table after the profligate have gorged themselves on debt.

That’s why Paul Krugman is a politician.

And not any politician but one who is not an iota different from his "enormously intellectual” kindred spirit who ran on promises of "hope” and "change” only to approve trillions for "stimulus” spending, healthcare "reform,” bailouts for Fannie, Freddie, and auto workers, and the hiring of at least 100,000 new federal bureaucrats to administer hundreds of new federal bureaucracies, on top of a current $1.5 trillion annual federal deficit — all without uttering a single specific word about the fiscal and social burden that his manic borrowing and spending will inevitably lay on the backs of the American people.

That’s why Paul Krugman and his deceitful, insidious alter ego fully deserve the bitter condemnations that, for millennia, humanity’s great truth-tellers have levied upon practitioners of possibly earth’s oldest but surely its filthiest profession.

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.