April 6, 2012

Paul Krugman's History Problem

By Jon N. Hall
The national debt divides America into two camps. One camp contends that the debt is a manageable, long-term problem and is not all that menacing. The other camp fears that the debt poses a serious, immediate and perhaps even existential threat to America. Although former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill claimed that in 2002 Dick Cheney said that "deficits don't matter [page 56]," the first camp is mainly composed of progressives. Their spiritual leader is one Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times and said by some to be an economist. The tacit proposition in one of Krugman's recent columns, "Nobody Understands Debt," is that only he, Krugman, and perhaps a few of his acolytes, truly understands debt: Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we're impoverished by the need to pay back money we've been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments. This is, however, a really bad...(Read Full Article)