Paul Krugman’s anti-austerity, pro-Keynesian views sounds like a broken record, even to the left-wing publications that agree with him.
Mike Pesca, who has a daily podcast for Salon called “The Gist,” said that the Nobel Prize-winning economist’s opinion columns for The New York Times are getting tiresome because he mostly talks about the same three things. Pesca noted, “He says austerity is bad, inflation fears are overblown and Keynes was right. I get it. I agree.”
On the front of Sunday's Business section, Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein slammed GOP candidates: "If you came up with a bumper sticker that pulls together the platform of this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates, it would have to be: Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP."
Pearlstein seemed especially insulted that Gov. Rick Perry would suggest John Maynard Keynes and his "stimulus" economics were through, and no one on the Republican stage came to the liberal icon's defense. Somehow, reporters (and former reporters like Pearlstein) always expect there to be a liberal in the other party's fold. Liberals really hate it when you say their ideas are outdated.
CNN's Eliot Spitzer arrogantly lectured about the benefits of Keynesian economics Sunday while accusing fellow panelists on "Fareed Zakaria GPS" of not knowing what they were talking about because they weren't business owners.
This led British historian Andrew Roberts to point out that President Obama's administration are mostly academics, and Ann Coulter to ask Spitzer, "What business have you ran? You’re a governor" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
I'm guessing that Paul Krugman and David Brooks don't hang out that much together. So when both turn up on the New York Times op-ed page this morning with columns calling for massive government spending, I'm assuming they came to their conclusions independently. My working hypothesis: if Krugman and Brooks agree on something this important, they must be wrong.[W]hat the economy needs now is something to take the place of retrenching consumers. That means a major fiscal stimulus. And this time the stimulus should take the form of actual government spending rather than rebate checks that consumers probably wouldn’t spend.From Brooks:
Let’s hope, then, that Congress gets to work on a package to rescue the economy as soon as the election is behind us.