Re: Bush's Aggressive Accounting

[gautam_mukunda]

[snipping Krugman rant]
I think this article is dead on.

--
Doug

I could point out that Krugman has become such a loon that he has written
in the New York Times his belief that Enron is more important than
September 11th.  Or comment on what a tragedy it is that one of the best
economic minds of his generation has turned into the worst New York Times
columnist in living memory.  But I think the best thing to do is to paste
Andrew Sullivan's response to Krugman's rant, from his superb website
www.andrewsullivan.com.  Below:
                                                                             
                                                                             
                                                                             
                                       Today's column from Paul Krugman      
                                       makes Paul Begala look positively     
                                       non-partisan. There's first a         
                                       strained attempt at the most          
                                       ambitious-yet Enron analogy. Krugman  
                                       charges that "on the basis of surplus 
                                       fantasies, the administration ? aided 
                                       by an audit committee, otherwise      
                                       known as the U.S. Congress, that      
                                       failed to exercise due diligence ?    
                                       gave itself a big bonus in the form   
                                       of a huge tax cut." Ergo, Congress is 
                                       Arthur Andersen. Ergo, Bush is Enron. 
                                       Q.E.D. But wait a minute. For this    
                                       analogy to even begin to work,        
                                       wouldn't the tax cut have to have     
                                       been applied only to the members of   
                                       the administration? And wouldn't the  
                                       Congress, including many Democrats,   
                                       have to have been complicit in that?  
                                       And wouldn't the tax-payers, like     
                                       Enron's shareholders, have been       
                                       fleeced rather than reimbursed? You   
                                       have to wonder if Krugman has so      
                                       bought his own demagoguery that for a 
                                       split second he almost believed that. 
                                       Or is he just equating Ken Lay and    
                                       George W. Bush anyhow, anyway, by any 
                                       rhetorical means? Then there's the    
                                       extraordinary argument that the Bush  
                                       administration has cynically used the 
                                       tragedy of September 11 to add to its 
                                       budget a "one-time charge" ? an       
                                       "accounting trick" worthy of Enron's  
                                       crooks. That "one-time charge," you   
                                       see, is the new defense budget! It's  
                                       a phony new charge, in Krugman's      
                                       view, made purely to cook the books   
                                       to distract attention from Ken        
                                       Lay-style embezzlement by the         
                                       president. Think of that for a        
                                       minute. Krugman is asserting that the 
                                       Bush administration's response to the 
                                       terrorist attacks of last fall was    
                                       not designed actually to protect us   
                                       from danger or to defeat a real       
                                       threat ? but in order to preserve     
                                       their malevolent fiscal agenda, aimed 
                                       at their own enrichment. Our current  
                                       war is therefore nothing less than a  
                                       conscious, cynical attempt by Bush to 
                                       rob the American tax-payer in order   
                                       to shovel money at corporate defense  
                                       contractors and the rich, regardless  
                                       of the country's military, fiscal or  
                                       economic needs. I guess at least we   
                                       now know what Krugman really thinks.  
                                       He and Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky  
                                       seem to have a huge amount now in     
                                       common.                               
                                                                             
                                                                             



I think this response is dead-on, and that it's a tragedy that Krugman went
from one of the best columnists in America (when he wrote for Slate) to one
of the worst (now that his ego has expanded beyond all bounds because he
writes for the Times).  The _real_ reason he's upset, though, is that he
got $50,000 for no work from Enron and has been harshly criticized for
refusing to disclose that fact to his readers - so he's trying to divert
attention from it by attacking everyone else and hiding in the smoke.

Gautam