from newspaper columns by
Paul Krugman

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune March 24, 2003

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Jan. 22, 2003

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Aug. 25, 2009

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naive, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it.

President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.

And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Aug. 8, 2010

Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to a Washington Post report, his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the red ink: “The Congressional Budget Offfice has estimated that [Ryan’s plan] would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts alone. It didn’t address revenue losses from his tax cuts.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has. [...] If you add in these revenue losses, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughtly $1.3 trillion.

In its first decade, most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Ryan doesn't say.

After 2020, the main alleged saving would come from sharp cuts in Medicare, achieved by dismantling Medicare as we know it, and instead giving seniors vouchers to buy their own insurance. [...]

And we know, from experience with the Medicare Advantage program, that a voucher system would have higher, not lower, costs than our current system. The only way the Ryan plan could save money would be by making those vouchers too small to pay for adequate coverage.

So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the GOP making sense.

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Sept. 28, 2010

I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the workforce is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs – and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society.

So what you need to know is that there is no evidence whatsoever to back these claims. We aren’t suffering from a shortage of needed skills; we’re suffering from a lack of policy resolve.

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Aug. 8, 2023

[...] Higher interest payments lead to rising debt, which leads to even higher interest payments, adding even more debt, and we enter a sort of fiscal doom loop. Is this something to worry about?

No, not really. To see why, we need to do a bit of math. Sorry, I’m going to write down a simple equation here.

Bear in mind that we’re talking about the ratio of debt to GDP, not simply the level of debt. Deficits, which lead to more debt, increase the numerator of that ratio. But both inflation and economic growth increase the denominator, which, other things being equal, reduces the ratio. Do a bit of algebra, and you get this expression for debt dynamics:

Change in debt/GDP = primary deficit/GDP + (r-g)*(debt/GDP)

The primary deficit is the budget deficit not counting interest payments, r is the interest rate on government debt, and g is the economy’s growth rate. You can get a debt spiral if r is significantly larger than g; in that case, rising debt leads to faster accumulation of debt, and we’re off to the races.

But a few years ago, Olivier Blanchard, one of the world’s most repected (and, dare I say, respectable) macroeconomists, gave a presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he showed that historically, r has generally been less than g. Hence, no debt spiral.

No, I’m not talking about Modern Monetary Theory. Trying to talk with MMT types feels like intellectual Calvinball — whenever you try to pin down what they’re saying, they insist that you just don’t get it.

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Nov. 15, 2023

But Trump has declared that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that, to steal from the late, great Molly Ivins, might sound better in the original German. Look, I know there’s a debate over whether the MAGA movement fully meets the classic criteria for fascism, but can we at least agree that its language is increasingly fascist-adjacent?

And so are its policies.

America doesn’t need to be made great again, because it’s already great. But if you wanted to destroy that greatness, the two most important things you would do would be to reject its commitment to freedom and close its doors to people seeking a better life.