Tonight PBS’s News Hour interviewed the non-economist Erskine Bowles, who has no real experience in government, for his view on what’s needed to avoid the looming “fiscal cliff”. After earlier in the day slapping John Boehner for using his name in trying to explain the GOP’s non-proposals on fiscal negotiations, Bowles slumped back to his default position of wailing that disaster is looming if we don’t disembowel Medicare and Medicaid, and partially disembowel Social Security.
This from the guy whose much-ballyhooed Simpson-Bowles Commission ended in abject failure, with participants laughing the final recommendations out of the room by a substantial margin.
But tomorrow’s guest, presumably providing the sane complement to the insane Bowles, i.e. a real economist (Nobel-Prize winning, no less) who understands all the economic schools (Keynes, Chicago, Austrians) backwards and forwards, will be Paul Krugman. Here are a few choice things the Perfesser has had to say blog-wise recently:
On Paul Ryan:
I wondered recently whether Paul Ryan, who is a con man pure and simple, would be able to step right back into his role as Washington’s favorite Honest, Serious Conservative.
Well, Alec MacGillis appears to have the answer: Foreign Policy Magazine has named Ryan one of its top 10 global thinkers.
And people wonder why I’m so caustic about the Very Serious People.
On the Right in general:
The point isn’t just that right-wingers believe in their own reality, but that they don’t think it matters that other people have different versions of reality. And no, this isn’t symmetric: liberals don’t consider it unnecessary to know what conservatives are thinking, or dismiss actually influential figures as marginal. Liberal may despise Rush Limbaugh, but they won’t dismiss him as a marginal figure nobody listens to.
On the insane push for austerity when it is inappropriate:
[T]he time for austerity is when the economy is close enough to full employment that the Fed is starting to raise rates to head off an undesirably high rate of inflation; at this point, given the case for somewhat higher inflation, I’d say that we shouldn’t even think about this until unemployment is well below 7 and falling fast. At that point you can, in effect, make a deal — fiscal austerity in return for not hiking rates — that leaves the economy harmless.
I can understand why politicians have a hard time getting this. But economists have no excuse.
You can visit Krugman’s New York Times blog anytime by clicking this link…
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
But tune in your local PBS News Hour broadcast tomorrow. Yes, this will be on the test!!