Grover Norquist and John Lott, Jr. lay waste to the economic claims of Obama-backer, stimulus defender, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in their new, hard-hitting book, Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future. Grover Norquist, who is the President of Americans for Tax Reform, and economist John Lott marshal a mountain of economic data that reveal that, contrary to Krugman’s Keynesian claims, President Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan has made the American economy worse, not better.
Their refutation makes for fascinating and sometimes humorous reading.
Consider, for example, the prediction Krugman made the day Obama signed the original stimulus bill into law: “I am still guessing that we peak out at around 9% [unemployment] and that would be late this year [2009].” Furthermore, Krugman declared that double-digit unemployment was “not the most likely event.” As Norquist and Lott note, unemployment hit 10.1% and remained above 9% two years after Krugman predicted it would peak.
Once it became clear that President Obama’s stimulus plan had failed to ignite the economic recovery he promised, Krugman and others began scrambling for excuses to explain why Obama’s spending spree hadn’t worked. One explanation Krugman offered was that right-wingers had erroneously claimed government spending had increased when it hadn’t:
So as I said, the big government expansion everyone talks about never happened….And federal aid to state and local governments wasn’t enough to make up for plunging tax receipts in the face of the economic slump….[T]here’s a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn’t—is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers.
As Norquist and Lott reveal, Krugman’s claims rely on a slippery game of sleight of hand; Krugman cherry-picks the only year when total government spending dropped, which was from 2009 to 2010, “and even then, it was still much higher than just a couple of years earlier.” In point of fact, note the authors, government spending has grown 12 percent since 2008 and 20 percent since 2007.
In one of the more outrageous examples of Paul Krugman’s Keynesian illogic, Norquist and Lott showcase the New York Times columnist’s bizarre contention that an alien space invasion could help stimulate America’s floundering economy:
That had to be one of the most smelly eviscerations ever. This guy is 1000% full of liberal wacho BS!!
This sounds a lot like conservative propaganda to me.
@Liberal1 (objectivity):
You are such a blowhard, Lib1. You’ve recently been spouting off about us conservatives here needing to get the “other side of the story”, and presenting us with links to lib/prog sites and stories on the topics presented here. And then you go and tell us what you really think. That is, that anything coming from conservatives is “propaganda”.
Where is your suggestion of getting the “other side of the story”, Lib1? Or does that only apply to the non-lib/progs? Can you not see your own hypocrisy? Nevermind, the answer is plain to see in that comment above.
Thanks for coming here again and producing another comment of uselessness. Hypocrite.
Liberalspeak translation: Conservative Propaganda- Anything that doesn’t toe the leftist line or utterly proves a leftist claim false.