Paul Krugman, "Sequester of Fools": Anus Horribilis

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Sequester of Fools" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/opinion/krugman-sequester-of-fools.html), Paul Krugman rails against the sequester. Krugman writes:

"Messrs. Bowles and Simpson had their moment — the annus horribilis of 2011, when Washington was in thrall to deficit scolds insisting that, in the face of record-high long-term unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, we forget about jobs and concentrate exclusively on a 'grand bargain' that would supposedly (not actually) settle budget disputes for ever after.

That moment has now passed; even Mr. Bowles concedes that the search for a grand bargain is on 'life support.' Let’s convene a death panel! But the legacy of that year of living foolishly lives on, in the form of the 'sequester,' one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history.

. . . .

The good news is that compared with our last two self-inflicted crises, the sequester is relatively small potatoes. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would have threatened chaos in world financial markets; failure to reach a deal on the so-called fiscal cliff would have led to so much sudden austerity that we might well have plunged back into recession. The sequester, by contrast, will probably cost 'only' around 700,000 jobs."

I agree, the United States, under the able stewardship of President Obama, is again steering for an economic iceberg, and even Krugman acknowledges in this instance, with regard to the sequester, that "Republicans and Democrats alike signed on to this idea."

But just a moment. What is this talk about the fiscal cliff taking the US "back into recession"? Excuse me, did I miss something over the past few days? Wasn't it Krugman who, in an op-ed entitled "Rubio and the Zombies" (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.co.il/2013/02/paul-krugman-rubio-and-zombies.html), just informed us that America is "more than five years into the worst economic slump since the Great Depression"? Apparently the Nobelist from the Times is suddenly aware of something that I don't know.