Class warriors are lighting matches in a powder keg
August 20th 2011
Paul Krugman, the great liberal economist, wrote on his blog yesterday, “things are looking really terrible, And crucially, they’re looking terrible in the wrong way, at least if you wanted to believe that political and policy debate over the past year and a half made any sense at all.”
Krugman was restricting his comments to the state of the economy, with considerable cause; he fears that the tight money policies that “serious people” advocate will result in an economic perfect storm that will combine the worst of Japan’s lost decade with the 1937 recession. The term “serious people” doesn’t appear in this blog, but it’s the term he uses frequently to refer to conservative economists and politicians who have pushed for the disastrous austerity programs that are dismantling Europe and stalling any hope of recovery in America.
The scary bit is that Krugman isn’t a merchant of doom; he’s a responsible journalist who is careful not to instill extraneous fear in people. If he says there’s a serious problem, it’s because there’s a serious problem, and not because he’s stuck for something to say in his blog.
