Paul Krugman – New York Times Columnist; Inadvertent Humorist
When I was young, and my father was still alive, he would tell me things with a dead serious face that were ridiculous. Down was up, water was made of sand, or the sky was green. He looked so deadpan that I doubted what I either knew, or what my eyes were telling me. He loved to tell tall tales as a way of making me think for myself, and I loved him for it, and have done the same to my children.
Fast forward: Two years ago (2008) I wrote ab0ut Paul Krugman, the Nobel winning economist that writes a column in the New York Times. I said that I thought he was funny in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, as the statements and positions that he took seemed absurd. He couldn’t possibly be that far removed from reality. And in the interests of fairness, neither economics or math were my strong suit. It may be that he is too lofty and esoteric for my Middle American background. He seemed divorced from what we in the Midwest call “common sense”. You know, as in “water is wet” and “ice is cold” or “don’t play in a busy street”. How many kids have rolled their eyes when hearing that from their mothers? “Really, Ma? Don’t play where all the big cars are going fast? Huh, who’d of thunk it?”
Since then I have read his columns, first with disbelief, then with irritation. How could a person be so seemingly out of touch, and yet win the Nobel for economics? I didn’t have to wait long for the answer: President Obama, who has never held a “real” job, won the Nobel Prize for Peace, despite having done exactly nothing. An internet photo of a restaurant billboard making rounds at the time summed it up perfectly – “A Nobel Peace Prize with every order!”. What used to be an honor was now political toilet tissue. He won the Prize, not for what he had done, but for what he “was going to do”. Wow. I need to get to Stockholm to let them know that sometime in the future, I will invent a “Peace Ray”. But the prize money now will come in handy. Even Obama supporters were struggling to justify the award at the time. Those that did, despite the evidence, were not critical thinkers, but what has become known as “Obamabots”, the equivalent of a political zombie.
They say that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result. Mr. Krugman follows this formula perfectly. Not only does he seem to come up with the same old thought processes and expect different results, but he also wants to double-down on the losing ideas. Now, after two years of reading his columns, it has become apparent that he 1) doesn’t learn from his mistakes; 2) is incapable of thinking outside of a very narrow ideology; and 3) would be a good weatherman based on his track record. Except that weathermen (or meteorologists) are right 46% of the time, and I haven’t seen Paul Krugman right yet. My former boss said “even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while” and “a broken clock is right twice a day”. My personal favorite is “Economists have predicted 47 of the last 3 recessions.” So you almost have to go out of your way to someone who is so slavish to an ideology that he ignores all evidence to the contrary and plows ahead into what appears to be some type of nonsensical thought process and then tries to convince others that those ideas make sense.
Don’t believe me? Here are some of the recent gems he has spouted.
1. “Discussions over – we need a second stimulus” Remember what I said about expecting a different result?
2. The Angry Rich – he argues against tax cuts with incomplete ideas, hoping (it didn’t work) that no one will notice that at the end of the day, his plan would trade $700 billion for $3 trillion in additional debt.
Even the media is becoming uncomfortable with him and his stances. Aug 6, 2010 … It really is time for the New York Times Ombudsperson to step in and stop Paul Krugman from perpetrating further intellectual fraud and…
According to the New York Times itself:
“Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults…. some of Krugman’s enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn’t mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn’t hold his columnists to higher standards.”
Thus wrote New York Times “public editor” Daniel Okrent in his column, his final one before resigning his post. There it is, right in the newspaper of record.
To be sure, Okrent could have gone much, much further in blowing the whistle on America’s most dangerous liberal pundit. He could have cited the dozens upon dozens of partisan distortions, uncorrected errors, deliberate misquotations, and flat-out lies that we’ve caught Krugman making over the years. For that matter he could have echoed what N. Gregory Mankiw, the universally respected former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, told Fortune in a recent interview — that Krugman “just make[s] stuff up.” Or is just dead wrong.
How about this gem?
In a July 14, 2008 op-ed in the New York Times, Krugman explained why Fannie and Freddie were blameless. “Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off,” he wrote. “Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income. So whatever bad incentives the implicit federal guarantee creates have been offset by the fact that Fannie and Freddie were and are tightly regulated with regard to the risks they can take. You could say that the Fannie-Freddie experience shows that regulation works.”
Oops.
“Critics were quick to point out that Krugman had his facts wrong. As Charles Calomiris, a professor at Columbia University, and Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute (and member of the financial crisis inquiry commission) explained, “Here Krugman demonstrates confusion about the law (which did not prohibit subprime lending by the GSEs), misunderstands the regulatory regime under which they operated (which did not have the capacity to control their risk-taking), and mismeasures their actual subprime exposures (which he wrongly states were zero).” (Foreign Policy)
“THE “PUBLIC EDITOR” GOES PUBLIC ON KRUGMAN CORRECTION… New York Times “public editor” Byron Calame is in print with the fact that the paper’s columnist corrections policy is not being observed with respect to Paul Krugman’s admitted errors…”
Or this, from last weeks column: “Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending. “ This “attack” was allowing people to take a portion of their Social Security deduction and control and invest it however they saw fit. The problem with this is that the government does not want people to have any control of how their money is spent (or not spent, as the case may be). The government resists any notion of the people controlling their own money and future.
I wrote this back in September of 2010. I didn’t publish it at the time, as procrastination can sometimes save you from doing something foolish. Not this time, though. The articles from Mr. Krugman continue into fantasy, sweeping away any thoughts that I had about his being open-minded. He follows his ideology – I’ll give him that. But when everyone knows what’s going on (the economy tanking, unemployment rising, monstrous over-reaching government) it might be better to acknowledge those things than to tell everyone that the sky is green. At least Dad knew he was kidding.
