For God’s sake, President Obama: listen to Paul Krugman! He’s a Nobel Prize winning economist!
He knows what he’s talking about, and he’s laid it all out for you in this interview about his new book:
“What they should be saying is, ‘We have the right ideas and we’re pursuing them as far as we can given the opposition from Republicans,’ which would be more or less the true narrative,” Krugman said. “They have decided that it sounds like weakness to say that we haven’t been doing everything that we should be doing. And so they have instead opted to always pretend that what they thought they were able to get is also exactly what they should have done. So they’ve never conceded that that first stimulus was too small, or that there really should have been a second round of stimulus. And that means that if things go badly, they end up owning it. They can’t say, ‘Don’t blame us, blame the do-nothing Congress.'”
The deficit isn’t big enough, Mr. President! You have to make it a few trillion bigger! And if you don’t, then you “own” the economy!
See, that right there is why Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning, PhD holding, New York Times columnizing national treasure, and I’m not. It’s brilliant. This is exactly what President Obama should run his re-election campaign on. Exactly this.
Hat tip Ed Morrissey, who says:
No matter what Krugman claims now, the Obama administration proposed the $800 billion stimulus and predicted it would stop joblessness from rising above 8%, and it hasn’t been below 8% since. That’s failure no matter how one wants to spin it.
Yes, but Ed, that’s because it wasn’t big enough! And because Obama didn’t do it twice! If we only had a few trillion more dollars in debt – a few trillion more out-of-thin-air FED dollars – that would make it all better! Don’t you see?