hard heads soft hearts |
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a scratch pad for half-formed thoughts by a liberal political junkie who's nobody special. ''Hard Heads, Soft Hearts'' is the title of a book by Princeton economist Alan Blinder, and tends to be a favorite motto of neoliberals, especially liberal economists. mobile
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Friday, June 14, 2002
two Krugman quotes from a 1999 Slate breakfast table between Krugman and Kathleen Sullivan: "As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious and practical. Here's the article" "I have to say that this was not the week I would have wanted to do the "Breakfast Table"--whatever thoughts you and I might have had about other issues are crowded out by the events in Kosovo. And I do not think of myself as an all-purpose pundit. I remember once (during the air phase of the Gulf War) seeing John Kenneth Galbraith making pronouncements on TV about the military situation, and telling friends that if I ever start pontificating in public about a technical subject I don't understand, they should gag me. " Both you and Krugman deserve sharp rebukes for over-zealous, and therefore inaccurate, rabble-rousing. Krugman emphatically did *not* say that the war on terrorism was *planned* to obscure bad budget news. He said the war was (dishonestly) *used* to explain away bad budget news. You're too smart not to see the huge difference between those two assertions. Your animus towards Krugman blinded you. As for Krugman, the first half of his column is excellent. In the second half he gets sidetracked, and suffers an embarassing lapse in logic, perhaps partly because he was constrained by space. Obviously the purpose of heavy duty conventional weapons is to be used against states that harbor terrorists and develop WMD, not individual terrorists with boxcutters. Here's a better way to make Krugman's point: Bush claims that the $5.6 trillion dollar surplus for the next ten years his White House projected in *April* 2001 (just ten months ago!) has shrunk to a $1 trillion projected surplus because of the war, recession and homeland defence. Suppose Defence spending is increased an extra $50 billion dollars for ten years, and add $25 billion for homeland defence. For the recession, assume the economy stinks up the budget for all of 2001 and 2002, chopping off another $250 billion each year. But wait a second. That adds up to 1.25 trillion. Add the Administrations tax cut, which they claim is 1.35 trillion, under these very generous stipulations, it still adds up to at most 3 trillion. Where did the extra 1.6 trillion go? The answer is, in the administration's dishonest math. It is in this sense that Krugman is accusing the White House of dishonestly using the President's war-time credibility to cover up their lies, and he is dead right. The situation is even worse than that, because the Administration's $1 trillion projected surplus is a lie. The surplus is all gone. |