{"id":11383,"date":"2015-08-23T08:13:49","date_gmt":"2015-08-23T13:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11383"},"modified":"2015-08-23T08:13:49","modified_gmt":"2015-08-23T13:13:49","slug":"krugmans-dopey-diatribe-deifying-the-public-debt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11383","title":{"rendered":"Krugman\u2019s Dopey Diatribe Deifying The Public Debt"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/davidstockmanscontracorner.com\/krugmans-dopey-diatribe-deifying-public-debt\/\" target=\"_blank\">Krugman\u2019s Dopey Diatribe Deifying The Public Debt<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Actually, dopey does not even begin to describe Paul Krugman\u2019s latest spot of tommyrot.\u00a0But least it\u00a0appear that the good professor is\u00a0being caricaturized,\u00a0here are his own\u00a0words.\u00a0In a world drowning in government\u00a0debt what we desperately need, by golly,\u00a0is more of\u00a0 the same:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>That is, there\u2019s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the world economy right now is that\u00a0<em><strong>governments aren\u2019t deep enough in debt.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Yes, indeed. There is currently about $60 trillion of public debt outstanding on a worldwide basis\u00a0compared to less than $20 trillion at the turn of the century. But somehow this isn\u2019t enough, even though the gain in public debt\u2014\u2014-from the US to Europe, Japan, China, Brazil and the rest of the debt saturated EM world\u2014\u2013actually exceeds the $35 billion growth\u00a0of global GDP\u00a0during the last 15 years.<\/p>\n<p>But rather than explain why economic growth in most of the world is slowing to a crawl despite this unprecedented eruption of public debt, Krugman chose to smack down one of his patented strawmen. Noting that Rand Paul had lamented that 1835 was the last time the US was \u201cdebt free\u201d, the Nobel prize winner offered up a big fat non sequitir:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Wags quickly noted that the U.S. economy has, on the whole, done pretty well these past 180 years, suggesting that having the government owe the private sector money might not be all that bad a thing. The British government, by the way,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com\/2015\/08\/14\/r-e-s-p-e-c-t\/\" target=\"_blank\"><u>has been in debt<\/u><\/a>\u00a0for more than three centuries, an era spanning the Industrial Revolution, victory over Napoleon, and more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Neither Rand Paul nor any other fiscal conservative ever said that public debt per se would freeze economic growth or technological progress hard in the horse and boggy age. The question is one of degree and of whether at\u00a0today\u2019s unprecedented\u00a0public debt\u00a0levels we get economic growth\u2014\u2013even at a\u00a0tepid rate\u2014\u2013in spite of\u00a0rather than because\u00a0of soaring government debt.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Krugman\u2019s Dopey Diatribe Deifying The Public Debt Actually, dopey does not even begin to describe Paul Krugman\u2019s latest spot of tommyrot.\u00a0But least it\u00a0appear that the good professor is\u00a0being caricaturized,\u00a0here are his own\u00a0words.\u00a0In a world drowning in government\u00a0debt what we desperately need, by golly,\u00a0is more of\u00a0 the same: That is, there\u2019s a reasonable argument to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5979,2120,195,240,353,380,614,3053,2305],"class_list":["post-11383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-contracorner","tag-david-stockman","tag-debt","tag-economic-growth","tag-gdp","tag-government-debt","tag-paul-krugman","tag-public-debt","tag-rand-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11384,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11383\/revisions\/11384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}