Capping a week of the most partisan coverage since the past campaign in America’s newspaper of wretched, The New York Times’ collectivist pit bull sank his teeth into Republicans who refused to genuflect to Obama-nomics.
Despite the passage of an almost $800-billion spend-our-way-to-prosperity bill, Paul Krugman is down in the dumps.
We’re simply not spending enough to counteract “the worst slump since the Great Depression” and it’s all the GOP’s fault, Krugman squawked in a column today.
Rather than being properly chastened “given both their drubbing in the past two elections and the economic debacle of the past eight years,” Krugman writes, congressional Republicans insisted on thinking independently instead of just shutting up and voting for a bill covering over 1,000 pages of small type.
It wasn’t the Bush tax cuts that got us into this mess, as Krugman insists, but the sub-prime lending practices foisted on Fannie and Freddie by spread-the-wealth Democrats.
When Barney Frank’s house of cards came tumbling down, Krugman didn’t have to look far for the villain — tax cuts. Allowing taxpayers to keep a bit more of their income is always a huge mistake, in Krugman’s and The Times’ estimation.
That’s because the federal government — which can’t deliver the mail on time or conduct the decennial census without turning it into a Hollywood production — can spend our hard-earned income so much more effectively than those who actually produce the nation’s wealth.
Cassandra Krugman concludes with “And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years.”
What would constitute rising to the challenge — spending $2 trillion or $3 trillion? Government caps on salaries and wages (which Frank hints at)? Nationalizing the banks and auto industry? Don’t ask. The New York Times might just give you the answers you’ve always suspected.
@nytimes.com
