Sunday, July 10, 2011

Krugman - The Long and the Short of It - NYTimes.com

How do we get rid of David Brooks. Because he occasionally parrots some sensible statement people think he is sensible. Then comes along another piece of idiocy. Friday evening, paired with E.J. Dionne on NPR he announced that government can't do much about short term economic issues, it should concentrate on the long term. Now just tell me which is harder:

Planning how the economy will look five years from now or spending $100 billion to pave roads? And put $$ in workers' pockets, so they can buy things?
When Eric Cantor says "never raise taxes in a recession" as he does every day, it means: spend money on bridge replacement in a recession. If the first is true, the second must be truer.

- GWC
by Paul Krugman
The Long and the Short of It - NYTimes.com: "A number of people have been telling me about David Brooks and Ruth Marcus agreeing that there’s not much government can do about short-run economic performance, that we need to focus on long-run solutions. It’s a common sentiment inside the Beltway.

And it’s also utterly, utterly backwards. Changing the economy’s long-run growth rate is hard. We’ve had almost 25 years of “new growth theory” research, with every possible regression run, looking for the keys to faster growth; my sense is that we’ve basically come up dry."

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