I wake up this morning to find that Paul Krugman was won the Nobel Prize for Economics. This breaking news was diaried by trifecta:
Breaking: The Shrill One Paul Krugman Wins The Nobel Prize
So, lets look at Paul Krugman on the two Presidential Candidates. We will start from just before the all important September month began.
August 29, 2008.
Feeling No Pain
This article is important as it highlights the main difference between Obama and McCain. Obama gets it, McCain doesn't.
Republicans vs Democrats:
Democrats say and, as far as I can tell, really believe that working Americans are getting a raw deal; Republicans, despite occasional attempts to sound sympathetic, basically believe that people have nothing to complain about.
What we know, what America knows - Obama is the candidate for the Middle Class.
And what one sees on the other side is a total lack of empathy for and understanding of the problems working Americans face. Mr. Clinton, famously, felt our pain. Republicans, manifestly, don’t. And it’s hard to fix a problem if you don’t even think it exists.
September 11, 2008.
Blizzard of Lies
The campaign of hate, lies and deceit that John McCain is running.
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, "Thanks, but no thanks" when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
More importantly, the campaign you run tells us about how you would run the country:
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
He gives the answer too:
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
September 28, 2008.
The 3 A.M. Call
Who do you trust to take the 3 AM phone call when the economy is tumbling, Hedge funds are breaking and Americans are hurting?
So what do we know about the readiness of the two men most likely to end up taking that call? Well, Barack Obama seems well informed and sensible about matters economic and financial. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me.
Why? Onc Reason - Phil Gramm. The person who should be on the top of the most wanted list for this economic mess.
Remember, his chief mentor on economics is Phil Gramm, the arch-deregulator, who took special care in his Senate days to prevent oversight of financial derivatives — the very instruments that sank Lehman and A.I.G., and brought the credit markets to the edge of collapse. Mr. Gramm hasn’t had an official role in the McCain campaign since he pronounced America a "nation of whiners," but he’s still considered a likely choice as Treasury secretary.
That certainly is downright scary.
We all know, the moment, the game changer:
Thus on Sept. 15 he declared — for at least the 18th time this year — that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." This was the day after Lehman failed and Merrill Lynch was taken over, and the financial crisis entered a new, even more dangerous stage.
We all do know the answer to this one:
The modern economy, it turns out, is a dangerous place — and it’s not the kind of danger you can deal with by talking tough and denouncing evildoers. Does Mr. McCain have the judgment and temperament to deal with that part of the job he seeks?
NO.
October 5, 2008.
Health Care Destruction
The famous article, where McCain's love for deregulation came to the Health Care Industry.
Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.
So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.
Strong words indeed. No wonder, Florida is going BLUE.
Compare the plans:
So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured.
Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.
Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.
Scary, Frightful, just plain Wrong.
Money quote:
In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.
We all are.
A stunning collection of articles and quotes, to show that Obama is the right choice for America and the right choice for the world. Spread the word, the Nobel Prize Winner for Economics favors Barack Obama's policy proposals.