It is very strange to see Joe Scarborough trying to win an economics argument with Paul Krugman. Krugman doesn’t know politics as well as Scarborough, but he does have a Nobel Prize in economics. He also has a track record. He’s been making predictions in print at least two times a week for years, and you can check his predictions to see how they turned out. On economic matters, he’s been very accurate. He’s certainly been better than average. Meanwhile, the austerity measures that have been pursued with such gusto in Europe offer us a counterexample. Austerity might assure that taxes are low and moneylenders get every possible bit of currency they lend out back with interest, but austerity is bad for economic growth and bad for employment. And low economic growth and high unemployment cause government debt.
People know that you have to spend money to make real money, but they somehow don’t think that applies to the government. At some point, you’d hope people would notice that printing money hasn’t caused inflation and big deficits haven’t driven up interest rates and that the economy performed better during the Stimulus than before or after it.
High unemployment is bad and has huge direct and indirect costs to society and the government. The best thing we could do is to spend a bunch of money to employ people doing whatever. Or, you know, just start handing out wads of cash.
In any case, Scarborough just thinks it’s bad to run a deficit and he can’t imagine why it could possibly be a bad idea to run smaller deficits during a time of slow economic growth and high unemployment. It’s a bad idea because it makes the problem worse. Is this really that hard to accept?
I thought this was telling:
Joe Scarborough Just Proved That Paul Krugman Is Right About the Debt
Joe’s response was essentially: We can worry about both. It’s like walking and chewing gum.
In order to prove Krugman wrong, Joe Scarborough has spent the last two weeks talking obsessively about … the debt. And attacking Paul Krugman about … the debt. And asking Steve Rattner to emphasize, not why Krugman is right about jobs, but why he’s wrong about … the debt. In the two weeks after saying he could focus on jobs and debt at the same time, Scarborough has tweeted a lot. Five tweets mentioned debt. Zero mentioned jobs. Since January 27, he has written three columns for Politico that contain ten mentions of the word debt (including two headlines) and zero mentions of the word jobs.
And the sequester is going to be tons of fun. 800,000 (est) workers furloughed for the remainder of the fiscal year (22 weeks), every Friday. Essentially, on top of a pay freeze that the president enacted early on in his presidency (which hasn’t expired, and can’t until we pass a budget rather than CR’s), every federal worker will take a 20% paycut.
Then the agencies lay people off for the next fiscal year.
… so we’re seeing Joe Scarborough trip over his laces and accidentally swallow his gum.
He can’t/refuses to accept that the government can actually help things. To folks like him, the government remains a drag on free enterprise and a misspender/misallocator of the taxpayer’s money.
Scarborough’s right. We can focus on the debt and jobs. We can return to Eisenhower-era tax brackets without the loopholes. We can delete all corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks and direct subsidies. We can fire military contractors like Blackwater/whatever and use the huge savings to treat our own soldiers better and smarter. We can goose Obamacare up to true universal health care and save billions. We can put a fractional tax on international money transfers over $500 or so. And much more.
That what you had in mind, Joe?
High Unemployment is good if you are a Corporate Exec and can get all sorts of talented people to grovel at your feet for a pittance.
Scarborough knows as a Republican he can’t say or do anything without consequences.
In 2001, before 9/11, two congresscritters had murder scandals involving their staff. One was not known to be a murder until years later – the woman simply disappeared. The other had the intern murdered literally in the congresscritter’s office.
The former case was covered literally day and night on cable news – and every broadcast news channel except CBS (Dan Rather thought it stupid). CNN practically rebranded itself the Condit News Network that summer, with breathless reports hourly about speculation on the latest speculation (there was virtually no new news after the first couple of days).
The latter was quickly hushed up and never reported outside of the local media in Florida. The husband of the victim may have been paid off.
In both cases there were rumors, never proven, of an affair between the congresscritter and the victim.
Guess which one was a Democrat and which won was a Republican?
And yes, Scarborough was the Republican.
Boo:
As wankerific as JoeScar is, he’s not the wanker of the day. No, James Wagner is the Wanker of the Day. Who is James Wagner you ask? He’s the President of Emory University. Get a load of this:
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2013/winter/register/president.html
Warning: Make sure you have a barf bag handy.
I guess I am supposed to know what the fuck he is talking about?
He’s saying that the 3/5 compromise was a great example of the country coming together to get things done.
It worked at the time.
I guess I see his point but still think he’s stupid to use that example.
I guess I see his point but still think he’s stupid to use that example.
Did it really work? The second half of your sentence there is really what the beef with it is.
On the national level, my spending is your income.
That’s the difference between a national economy and a household economy. I’d never heard it so clearly as when he expressed it.
Yes, that is a very good way to say it.