{"id":15892,"date":"2010-12-03T12:27:55","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T18:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=15892"},"modified":"2010-12-03T12:27:55","modified_gmt":"2010-12-03T18:27:55","slug":"paul-krugman-picks-up-where-the-republicans-left-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=15892","title":{"rendered":"Paul Krugman Picks Up Where The Republicans Left Off"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote on this earlier this week<\/a> but Paul Krugman does a great job of beating a dead horse, to make sure he’s dead.<\/p>\n

About that [federal workers’] pay freeze<\/a>: the president likes to talk about \u201cteachable moments.\u201d Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false.<\/p>\n

…freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It\u2019s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don\u2019t know anything about budget realities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ironically, Krugman beats the president about the head and shoulders for a surprising reason:<\/p>\n

Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do. Just ask Federal Reserve officials, who have lately been more or less pleading for some help in their efforts to promote faster job growth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Krugman confuses a bloated federal payroll with the kind of federal spending that purportedly, by liberals at least, boosts the economy, requiring a supsension of disbelief that the American people have no tolerance for, the elections being exhibit A.<\/p>\n

Krugman goes on to incredulously assert that the extension of the Bush tax cuts is a “break” for the wealthiest versus a tax hike. He ignores the fact that those cuts were very good for the economy and the equally pertinent fact that a tax hike for anyone <\/em>in this fragile economy is a ridiculous notion to anyone that would benefit by our economy creating more jobs.<\/p>\n

But then he goes on to redeem himself by exposing Obama’s dundering miscues:<\/p>\n

he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying \u201cKick me,\u201d although he might as well have.<\/p>\n

There were no comparable gestures from the other side. Instead, Senate Republicans declared that none of the rest of the legislation on the table \u2014 legislation that includes such things as a strategic arms treaty that\u2019s vital to national security \u2014 would be acted on until the tax-cut issue was resolved, presumably on their terms.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama\u2019s measure \u2014 that they\u2019re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it\u2019s also hard to escape the impression that they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?<\/p>\n

Mr. Obama almost seems as if he\u2019s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think they already know that Paul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote on this earlier this week but Paul Krugman does a great job of beating a dead horse, to make sure he’s dead. About that [federal workers’] pay freeze: the president likes to talk about \u201cteachable moments.\u201d Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false. …freezing federal pay is cynical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15892"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15902,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15892\/revisions\/15902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}