Paul Krugman Is Angry, And He’s Not Going to Take It Anymore

Don’t you realize Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize?

The downgrade of the federal government’s credit rating has produced on the part of the left’s commentariat a reaction resembling a hornet’s nest poked sharply with a stick. They are angry and are determined to get even with everybody else.

The inimitable Paul Krugman tells us, in the New York Times, that reluctance to pay any level of indebtedness the left chooses to run up constitutes “chutzpah,” a Yiddish term referring to shameless and insolent pushiness.

The nerve of some Americans! Who do they think they are, supposing that they should have more say over the disposal of their own resources than our Mandarin elect? Your money is Barack Obama’s and Paul Krugman’s, you see. How dare you tell them to stop spending it. Don’t you realize there are people in world taxed higher than you are?

[W]hat makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.

See what happens? You’ve been naughty, getting above yourselves and challenging the will of the establishment elect, interfering with the plans of the wiser and better among us to establish a better, nobler, a more just society. That kind of dissent is totally unacceptable and out of bounds and indulging in it makes you a bad person, an extremist, the kind of individual who deserves to be ignored, outlawed, and excluded.

The left’s tactics of marginalization worked wonderfully, long ago, in the time of Barry Goldwater. They stopped working, as I recall, in the late 1970s, when during the Carter Administration management of the economy by a left-wing president produced catastrophic results.

Voters, next year, are going to care about the restoration of economic confidence and prosperity, not the hard names people writing for the New York Times apply to people.

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