Interview with Paul Krugman
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| Mon, 08-09-2004 - 4:47pm |
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17435
BuzzFlash: In the preface to the hardcover edition of The Great Unraveling: Losing our Way in the New Century, you make ironic use of Henry Kissinger’s Ph.D. thesis at Harvard as a way to understand the radicalism of the Bush Administration. Could you explain that a bit more?
Paul Krugman: Well, it’s really good for explaining how reasonable people can’t bring themselves to see that they’re actually facing a threat from a radical movement. Kissinger talked about the time of the French Revolution, and pretty obviously he also was thinking about the 1930s. He argued that, when you have a revolutionary power, somebody who really wants to tear apart the system -- doesn’t believe in any of the rules -- reasonable people who’ve been accustomed to stability just say, "Oh, you know, they may say that, but they don’t really mean it." And, "This is just tactical, and let’s not get too excited." Anyone who claims that these guys really are as radical as their own statements suggest is, you know, "shrill." Kissinger suggests they'd be considered alarmists. And those who say, “Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal,â€are considered sane and reasonable.
Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening. For four years now, some of us have been saying, whether or not you think they’re bad guys, they’re certainly radical. They don’t play by the rules. You can’t take anything that you’ve regarded as normal from previous U.S. political experience as applying to Bush and the people around him. They will say things and do things that would not previously have made any sense -- you know, would have been previously considered out of bounds. And for all of that period, the critics have been told: "Oh, you know, you’re overreacting, and there’s something wrong with you."

Excellent interview! I read the whole piece. A few points that stood out, amongst the many. IMO.
>"Actually, there were a lot of little details in their story, but they weren’t the ones that you needed to know. There was no reason why they had to say Bush says it will break the bank. Why wasn’t there the follow-up sentence: "...but Kerry says he can pay for it by rolling back tax cuts for people making more than $200,000 a year." They didn’t include that following clause.
BuzzFlash: Why, do you think?
Paul Krugman: I think it was more sloppiness than anything else, but there’s a bias in the sloppiness. Reporters and producers know very well that if they do anything that can be construed as an unfavorable misrepresentation of Republican positions, there will be hell to pay, while misrepresenting what Democrats say is cost-free. Historically, there has been no punishment. Specific examples are not all necessarily cases of deliberate slanting of the news, but they sometimes are. For the most part, it’s simply asymmetric threats -- it’s safe to be snarky about Democrats, but to play it safe, you have to be extremely respectful towards Republicans."<
>"Well, I would have thought that TV could try to explain that fact. But I saw a couple of news shows that actually had graphics -- you know, bar charts -- of return on Social Security versus return on a bond -- 2% versus 4%. They were actively aiding this garbage comparison. That was not a case of the subject being too complicated. This was active -- they thought that people could understand a bar chart, but they chose to use their bar chart to support a bogus right-wing position."<
>"The fundamental fact of American politics -- and I’ve sharpened my view on this since last year and the hardcover edition of the book -- is that we’ve got an alliance between the religious right and the accumulators of great wealth. Those are the people who are running things. And then the question would be, how is it that these things go together so well? What happened to the streak in Christianity that is reveling and populist? Why has that been completely eliminated? George Lakoff has written about a conservative world view that you can kind of make sense of. It doesn’t work by the numbers, but it does work, sort of, emotionally. There's a focus on self-reliance, and therefore letting the wealthy get wealthier, with this world view.
But I think a lot of it is a marriage of convenience. The corporate insiders and the figures of the religious right have found each other mutually useful. The thing about the religious right is that it’s actually relatively centralized. There are people who can take their flock where they want to go. And they have, in effect, made a deal with the people with multi-million-dollar incomes. "I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine." If this coalition gets the kind of lock on power that it wants, the next phase is the struggle between those two sides. As for Tom DeLay, he is a fanatically religious person because that’s who he is, and he’s a fanatical supporter of the interests of the money, because that’s where the money is -- the money and the political support."<
>"the good people at the Center on Budget Policy Priorities, which is my favorite fiscal think tank, said flatly this is a scam. They are deliberately issuing a wildly high projection so that when the actual numbers come in, even though they’re worse than the year before, they can claim things are improving."<
>"And job growth is barely ahead of population growth. But their plan now is to just keep on saying how wonderful the economy is, and to keep people confused through November."<
>"Well, one of their credos, and Rove has said this, is if you say a lie five times, it becomes the truth."<
>"It scares me sometimes how blind people are. I first started talking about the Bush cult of personality early last year, although it was sort of obvious even before that. And I got slammed for that. What are you talking about? You are crazy, descending into madness, I think somebody wrote. And then, just a few months later, we had Operation Flight Suit, which was beyond anything even I thought they would try to do."<
I sometimes listen to a program, NPR,
Yup, the Repubs sure know how to use the stick for those who aren't biases for them.
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This probably is support for the above point, don't rock the Repubs boat.
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This is a logical conclusion, but one I hadn't reached yet. Pretty persceptive! Now do I want them to get the power so I can watch them tear themselves apart...Hmmm
<>"Well, one of their credos, and Rove has said this, is if you say a lie five times, it becomes the truth."<<
How many of us have figured this out. And if you don't believe after five times they will solicit the minnons and repeat a thousand times. Krugman is correct to belive how "blind" some people are. It is a national embarrassment.
I checked out both cites, and don't know what to think. I found the reports a little too old for my liking, but as a reference it might prove useful. I was baffled by the following statement:
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Unless I'm missing something this means Fox bias and the radio show, and perhaps some right leaning newspapers such as Washington Times and New York Post. Am I missing something? I am certainly not as willing to listen to both sides as I use to be, maybe because the first time I hear something I evaluate it, by the umpteenth time I hear it I have mentally dozed off. There are a few stations I listen to, but mostly I prefer the internet. I haven't read a print newspaper or magazine in years. As the media becomes more controlling of perspective I assume people will turn it off. Maybe I naive.
Edited 8/10/2004 5:14 pm ET ET by hayashig
Spin the Payrolls
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 10, 2004
When Friday's dismal job report was released, traders in the Chicago pit began chanting, "Kerry, Kerry." But apologists for President Bush's economic policies are frantically spinning the bad news. Here's a guide to their techniques.
First, they talk about recent increases in the number of jobs, not the fact that payroll employment is still far below its previous peak, and even further below anything one could call full employment. Because job growth has finally turned positive, some economists (who probably know better) claim that prosperity has returned - and some partisans have even claimed that we have the best economy in 20 years.
But job growth, by itself, says nothing about prosperity: growth can be higher in a bad year than a good year, if the bad year follows a terrible year while the good year follows another good year. I've drawn a chart of job growth for the 1930's; there was rapid nonfarm job growth (8.1 percent) in 1934, a year of mass unemployment and widespread misery - but that year was slightly less terrible than 1933.
So have we returned to prosperity? No: jobs are harder to find, by any measure, than they were at any point during Bill Clinton's second term. The job situation might have improved somewhat in the past year, but it's still not good.
Second, the apologists give numbers without context. President Bush boasts about 1.5 million new jobs over the past 11 months. Yet this was barely enough to keep up with population growth, and it's worse than any 11-month stretch during the Clinton years.
Third, they cherry-pick any good numbers they can find.
The shocking news that the economy added only 32,000 jobs in July comes from payroll data. Experts say what Alan Greenspan said in February: "Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow." Another measure of employment, from the household survey, fluctuates erratically; for example, it fell by 265,000 in February, a result nobody believes. Yet because July's household number was good, suddenly administration officials were telling reporters to look at that number, not the more reliable payroll data.
By the way, over the longer term all the available data tell the same story: the job situation deteriorated drastically between early 2001 and the summer of 2003, and has, at best, improved modestly since then.
Fourth, apologists try to shift the blame. Officials often claim, falsely, that the 2001 recession began under Bill Clinton, or at least that it was somehow his fault. But even if you attribute the eight-month recession that began in March 2001 to Mr. Clinton - a very dubious proposition - job loss during the recession wasn't exceptionally severe. The reason the employment picture looks so bad now is the unprecedented weakness of job growth in the subsequent recovery.
Nor is it plausible to continue attributing poor economic performance to terrorism, three years after 9/11. Bear in mind that in the 2002 Economic Report of the President, the administration's own economists predicted full recovery by 2004, with payroll employment rising to 138 million, 7 million more than the actual number.
Finally, many apologists have returned to that old standby: the claim that presidents don't control the economy. But that's not what the administration said when selling its tax policies. Last year's tax cut was officially named the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 - and administration economists provided a glowing projection of the job growth that would follow the bill's passage. That projection has, needless to say, proved to be wildly overoptimistic.
What we've just seen is as clear a test of trickledown economics as we're ever likely to get. Twice, in 2001 and in 2003, the administration insisted that a tax cut heavily tilted toward the affluent was just what the economy needed. Officials brushed aside pleas to give relief instead to lower- and middle-income families, who would be more likely to spend the money, and to cash-strapped state and local governments. Given the actual results - huge deficits, but minimal job growth - don't you wish the administration had listened to that advice?
Oh, and on a nonpolitical note: even before Friday's grim report on jobs, I was puzzled by Mr. Greenspan's eagerness to start raising interest rates. Now I don't understand his policy at all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/opinion/10krugman.html