Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Brad,
Any comments on dsquared assertion in the comments that Paul Krugman may have had a tiny chip on his shoulder?

“neoliberalism” is arriving a little late to the party. I recently came across this excellent piece by Bill Moyers that appears not to have been noticed much.

This is the Fight of Our Lives by Bill Moyers
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071804J.shtml

Excerpts:

"The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us."

Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won." Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts - almost all tilted towards the wealthiest people in the country. Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes. Cuts in taxes on investment income. And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.

Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.

These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing. But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans - and to the workings of American democracy - is no laughing matter.

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs - if this isn't class war, what is?

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this gathering confirms that while an America with liberty and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media - my industry - would help mend this broken promise and save this cause. With some exceptions I was wrong.

What we need is a mass movement of people like you. Get mad, yes - there's plenty to be mad about. Then get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our lives.

You can watch the video here.

www.inequality.org/conferencematerials.html

There's a pretty long pre-amble until Moyers nails it about 2/3 way thru.

Of course Krugman comes off as nerdy and sensible. The term "shrill" is used by rightwingers to describe anyone, male or female, whose views are so well-reasoned that there is no hope of challenging them on the merits.

Brad,

Could you please post a link to Kieran Healy's original text, or explain where it came from and why you can't post a link?

Interesting post, by the way; thanks.

Krugman is nerdy, but so what? He handles himself brilliantly on TV. I saw him on Tucker Carlson's show last week. He also has undergone the most interesting transformation of any pundit - including Hitchens who I don't think has changed as much as people say - from polemicist against the anti-globalizers to what he is now.

I saw Paul Krugman at a speech in San Francisco when the Great Unraveling first came out in hardback. Very unassuming guy. when he walked into the room, even before he was introduced the whole audience stood up and applauded -- and he blushed seriously bright pink.

It is hard to imagine that Paul Krugman would ever be considered a left-wing shrill nut. And he is labled that even after going after the Bush admin for some of its protectionist measures (though that pales in comparison with the other issues these days).

If we get a Democrat Pres and maybe at least a Senate, and trade and globalization come up again in that context, he can start bashing left wingers again, and balance will be restored in the world.

Krugman's "shrill" because he often has the tone of someone who stands on the street corner of NYC screaming that he knows who killed Kennedy or that he was touched by the love of Jesus and wants you to be touched by him, too. The difference between those people and Krugman is that Krugman actually has a case, and while his reaction isn't always admirable, it's perfectly understandable. He's simply astounded - and then appalled - at what Bush gets away with: policy proposals that aren't based on facts nearly as much as they are based on ideology, that are made through political eyes, and that go unchecked quite a lot. One of his big problems is/was Bush's claim that taxes were primarily cut for the middle and lower classes. He's disgusted that the press doesn't pick up, or at least doesn't report, the fact that these numbers are skewed and manipulated. It seems like he's not so much upset about the fact that Bush has a particular point of view, but, like I said above, by the fact that he goes about presenting it in a disingenuous and/or dishonest way.

One reason I hope that Kerry wins is that it would lighten Krugman up a little. I appreciate his usually spot-on fisking of the Bush administration as much as anyone, but his shrill nature, while understandable, gets to be a bit much. A Kerry presidency would hopefully be a breather for Krugman.

I could not care less about Paul Krugman's psyche. I am curious only if his arguments are valid. The guy is an opinion leader, not my drinking buddy.

To call him shrill is probably to concede that he has won the substance of whatever debate is in play. In my fraternity many years ago we had a rule: the first one to go ad hominem loses.

In fairness, I suppose Krugman would have lost a few on that basis. But I don't care. The question, always, is whether he is right.

Is it Krugman, or is it the times? The right says something is true and anyone who refuses to meet them half way is self-righteous and shrill? Moderates say a pox on both houses because the right has established a sense there is a "moral equivalence" between themselves and an imagined "left" that, if it ever existed, certainly is far from the mainstream now.

Here is the view of a self-confessed Democrat, with obvious sympathies for honesty in economic (and other) analysis, who makes a very odd comparison:

"And therein is the key to understanding Bob Bartley. The man who most nearly resembles him these days -- the writer who inherited his knack for galvanizing simplicity and clarity in writing, for polarizing self-righteousness and contempt in analysis -- surely is Paul Krugman of The New York Times. Certainly he offends those on the right who do not agree with him as deeply and routinely as Bartley ever offended those on the left."

http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/03.12.14.html

Of course, he is not saying Krugman is dishonest or wrong, but does manage to cast him as being as extreme as Bartley. This seems to lack a certain balance, but then, that was the goal of the right, wasn't it?