Not sure of what this is about, but Obama does look more and more like a failed President. While he has been successful in implementing measures like a half-baked health care initiative and an extension of umenployment insurance, he's given up a lot of ground to accomplish anything. He has, for example, had to extend the tax cut for the rich despite the growing US fiscal deficit and continuing economic problems. Where is the "Yes we can!" President of a couple of years ago?
Krugman is an advocate of strong government action and control. What he sees
is a President and government that's hemmed in by right-wing "market knows
best" views and a corporate sector that increasingly seems to thrive on
bubbles. He sees an increasingly divided economy in which the rich are getting
richer and the poor are becoming far too numerous. I can understand his
concern.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: [TriumphOfContent] When Zombies Win (Paul
Krugman - The NY Times)
Free market fundamentalists don't dominate the scene.Paul Krugman is totally
wrong. It is banker corporatists. Together with state corporatists, they pretty
went dominate the whole scene. They don't do anything much that's essential.
They don't make anything. They should be the oil that lubricate the larger
economic machine. Instead, they've become by far the largest single economic
sector in the country, and the government can do little to control them. And
much the same applies to the UK.
Who's the zombie?
Keith
At 12:25 20/12/2010 -0800, you wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steven Brant
Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2010 11:32 PM
To: Steven Brant
Subject: [TriumphOfContent] When Zombies Win (Paul Krugman - The NY Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20krugman.html
OP-ED COLUMNIST
When Zombies Win
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 19, 2010
When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I
believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists
have been wrong about everything yet they now dominate the political scene more
thoroughly than ever.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Go to Columnist Page »
Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
a.. Post a Comment »
How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its
knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says I dont think we need
regulators,about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after
the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations the first raised taxes
and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided
over anemic growth even before the crisis did we end up with bipartisan
agreement on even more tax cuts?
The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama
administration show that big-government policies dont work. But the response
should be, what big-government policies?
For the fact is that the Obama stimulus which itself was almost 40 percent
tax cuts was far too cautious to turn the economy around. And thats not 20-20
hindsight: many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the
plan was grossly inadequate. Put it this way: A policy under which government
employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services
grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of
Keynesian economics.
Now, maybe it wasnt possible for President Obama to get more in the face of
Congressional skepticism about government. But even if thats true, it only
demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.
Its also worth pointing out that everything the right said about why
Obamanomics would fail was wrong. For two years weve been warned that
government borrowing would send interest rates sky-high; in fact, rates have
fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about recovery, but stayed consistently
low by historical standards. For two years weve been warned that inflation,
even hyperinflation, was just around the corner; instead, disinflation has
continued, with core inflation which excludes volatile food and energy prices
now at a half-century low.
The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as
they have about events in America and suffered equally few consequences.
Ireland, declaredGeorge Osborne in 2006, stands as a shining example of the art
of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is
now Britains top economic official.
And in his new position, hes setting out to emulate the austerity policies
Ireland implemented after its bubble burst. After all, conservatives on both
sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a
resounding success. The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 and its working now,
declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again.
But such failures dont seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book
by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should
have killed but didnt, were still perhaps more than ever ruled by zombie
economics.Why?
Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to
slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead. And this is
especially, though not only, true of the president.
People tend to forget that Ronald Reagan often gave ground on policy
substance most notably, he ended up enacting multiple tax increases. But he
never wavered on ideas, never backed down from the position that his ideology
was right and his opponents were wrong.
President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the
aisle by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring
American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising
F.D.R.?), adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten
its belt even in the face of recession, offered symbolic freezes on spending
and federal wages.
None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist. But it
helped empower bad ideas, in ways that can do quite immediate harm. Right now
Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy but Republicans
are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects
from the deal. And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself
has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?
Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to
deal with ones political enemies. But its one thing to make deals to advance
your goals; its another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the
zombies end up eating your brain and quite possibly your economy too.
!DSPAM:2676,4d0f0695308681540513237!
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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