United Liberty
Paul Krugman Finally Admits He’s A Hack
Fri, 08/17/2012 - 11:15am | posted by Jeremy Kolassa
The New York Times’ pundit Paul Krugman finally admits what a lot of people have known for some time now—that he’s a partisan Democratic party hack:
Several commenters have asked that I provide examples of Republicans making reasonable economic arguments; some of them seem to be saying that I’m proving my bias if I don’t provide such examples.
But it doesn’t work that way: if all Republicans are saying unreasonable things, then it’s a distortion — indeed, a form of bias — to insist that there must be reasonable Republicans.
Now look, I’m not going to go out of my way to defend Republicans, as they’re a political party that’s less interested in governing and fixing our problems than in scoring cheap political points for theater, but the above statement is fairly outrageous. Not all Republicans are saying unreasonable things. In fact, a great many of them—Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Justin Amash, Richard Hanna, Jeff Flake, Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Jon Huntsman, even Paul Ryan to an extent—are saying very reasonable things.
But no, Paul Krugman is declaring them all to be unreasonable, because they are…Republicans. Not on their merits, just because they have an “R” after their name. Thanks for finally admitting it, you poseur.
Which is even more hilarious when you consider that he labels the Paul Ryan plan a “fantasy,”, but when you look at it, it’s really not all that different from Obama’s plan. So far, no criticism of the president. Maybe because he has a “D” after his name? Or is it because he’s shown up in an Obama campaign ad?
It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Paul Krugman has finally come clean, if obliquely, about being a hack. That’s worth it.
Actually he has a point. The idea that any two sides in a debate have equally valid ideas is, quite frankly, absurd. Simply saying “I have yet to see a reasonable economic position from the right” isn’t saying “no such position exists” or “I would never ever ever believe the right could be reasonable”. If one has examined the evidence from one side or the other and found it lacking it would be hackery to claim otherwise.
Especially when it comes to economics its time to stop pretending like the two sides of this debate (well that’s a largely oversimplified view, but whatever) have equivalent credibility. We KNOW what happens when the GOP implements its policies. They fail. We all saw it happen, we all experienced it first hand. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy don’t fuel the economy and lead to job creation. It leads to the wealthy becoming more wealthy. So no, he’s not a hack, those claiming the right wing positions to do the exact same (or more extreme) of what the GOP advocated for and did during the second Bush presidency are the hacks. It didn’t work. Time to move on and try something new and different.
Feel free to move to France. Francois Hollande is currently attempting to “try something new and different” there, and the results thus far haven’t exactly been stellar, nor will they be in the future. But he’s great at throwing out inane rhetoric about soaking the rich.
Feel free to move to Singapore or Hong Kong, the two most Capitalistic places on the planet.
actually giving the rich tax cuts had nothing to do with the failures of George W. Bush his tax cuts would have been a great idea if he weren’t spending trillions on wars, Borrowing money from china, Bailing out bankers, creating useless stimulus spending but his tax cuts are about the only thing i do agree with but if you want the rich to hire like they should be then we have to repeal a lot of these regulations people are afraid to hire because it is way too difficult to comply with all these regulations i would include 1 thing which could create jobs is repealing NAFTA
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