Friday, July 03, 2009

Krugman, you ignorant slut

Sez Paul Krugman:

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s.


Why yes, Paul, yes it is. Or at least it should be. Seeing as how you're a Nobel laureate in economics and are spouting off on the subject, you're presumptively of those people. So what's up with the howler that follows?

Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren't aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.


(h/t -- Memeorandum)

Hello, McFly? It wasn't that FDR's "job-creation policies" weren't "aggressive enough." Those policies extended the Depression for a good five years and it eventually ended in spite of, and not in any way because of, them.

Furthermore, the real kickoff to that Depression probably wasn't the 1929 stock market crash so much as the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which you yourself are pushing a direct analog to.

My grandma worshiped FDR, too. Matter of fact I'm pretty sure she thought he sat at the right hand of Jesus in heaven. But she didn't run around trying to pass herself off as an economist.

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