Sunday, June 15, 2014

Paul Krugman, "Yes He Could": In Which Alternate Universe Is Krugman Living?

My jaw dropped last week when I heard Hillary declare that her Russian "reset" had been a "brilliant stroke" (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2014/06/maureen-dowd-when-will-hillary-let-it.html). Well, if you thought Hillary's audacity pushed the edge of the envelope, she has now been outdone by Paul Krugman, who, in a New York Times op-ed entitled "Yes He Could" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/opinion/paul-krugman-health-care-and-climate-president-obamas-big-deals.html?ref=opinion&_r=0), would have us believe that Obama has emerged as a stellar president. Krugman begins:

"Several times in recent weeks I’ve found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they’re being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative."

Obama's friends in the mainstream media, particularly those at The New York Times, are responsible for the declining popularity of the president? Yeah, right.

But more to the point, how does Krugman go about proving that "Mr. Obama is having a seriously good year"? Simple: Obamacare. Krugman would have us know that first-year enrollments are above projections, and people are paying their premiums. What happened to, "If you like your health care plan and your doctor, you can keep them"? Krugman obviously doesn't give a damn.

However, as an economist, Krugman should care about cost, and you will recall that in December 2009 Obama declared, "I made clear from day one that I would not sign a health insurance reform bill if it raised the deficit by one dime." However, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is no longer projecting that Obamacare will cut the budget deficit (see: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/06/12/obamacare_and_the_cbo_--_no_longer_giddy_122956.html) at a time when US national debt in now in excess of $17.5 trillion and climbing.

Regarding financial reform under Obama, Krugman writes, "although it’s much weaker than it should have been, is real — just ask all those Wall Street types who, enraged by the new limits on their wheeling and dealing, have turned their backs on the Democrats." In a word: Poppycock! Under the very nose of Krugman's beloved Obama administration, high frequency trading is sucking the life blood from the economy, and meanwhile Obama's failure to reinstate the Uptick Rule provides hedge funds with the ability to manipulate share prices in any direction (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/08/maureen-dowd-summers-of-our-discontent.html).

Foreign policy? Where do I even begin? Iraq? Syria? Libya? The Ukraine? Crimea? China? The world has come to know that Obama's "red lines" are drawn with washable Crayons.

And that's not all. The scandal involving the targeting of conservative organizations by the IRS has resurfaced owing to a purported "computer crash," causing the IRS to "lose" the emails of Lois Lerner, former Director of Tax Exempt Organizations. However, as noted by John Steele Gordon at Commentary (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/06/15/are-lois-lerners-emails-really-lost/):

"The reason it may is because there are very good reasons to doubt the idea that these emails are irretrievably lost due to a simple crash of a personal computer’s hard drive. For one thing, downloading an email from an email server does not cause the email to be deleted from the server itself. And a lawyer in the Department of Justice, who understandably wishes to be anonymous, reports that government email servers are automatically backed up every night. So both Lerner’s computer and the email server would have had to crash for these emails to have been lost. That would be some coincidence."

Needless to say, The New York Times is doing its best to ignore this story.

Benghazi? This "bogus" scandal is very much alive after Ben Rhodes's email, suppressed by Obama and friends, came to light and revealed the administration's "goal":

"To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy."

Yes, he could? In fact, it couldn't get much worse, and we are left to wonder in which alternate universe is Krugman living.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, I saw the title and guessed that it's about Obama. So, it is about Obama. Krugman is a genuine, echte prostitute. Each day we get a confirmation of this simple fact. The NYT still doesn't know that a dog (sorry computer) ate IRS' emails. Krugman: "Me worry?" The NYT is now officially Der Neue Stuermer (broader studies, not only my competent analysis) and Krugman's response: "Me worry?" My grandparents are dead anyway (Auschwitz), so I can throw them under the bus, promote antisemitism myself (yes he does when the opportunity calls) and enjoy my non-Jewish ("I'm an internationalist") days in such pleasant places as a church in Norwich (the first libel accusation - 1144)"
    Life is good.

    ReplyDelete