That’s the Point
Paul Krugman is one of the smartest economists we can understand. He writes in English, not in Numblish.
The Nobel Prize winning Princeton economics professor cum New York Times columnist is in a tizz over the failings in three weeks of President Obama and his team on the eve of final debate and passage this week of an $800 billion-plus economic stimulus package.
Krugman eloquently limns out the deficiencies in the Senate compromise plan making progress toward a vote possibly as soon as tomorrow.
Obama, he says, has given in to the wanton partisan politics of the GOP with nary a fight.
All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.
But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.
After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.
Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.
Thing is, economics is economics. Being president is about more than economics. Being president is about making profoundly dysfunctional opposing and chaotically divergent interests coalesce around a plan that’s workable and achieves measurable impact vs. its goals.
That’s the point of being president. In Professor Krugman’s column today, the genius economist is asserting that he knows more than about economics; that he knows how politics works at the level of the White House and Capitol Hill.
Krugman’s mind and his mastery of his discipline and his writing are best suited toward generating better ideas in economics than are currently under consideration. He’s less well cut out to serve as a finger pointer crying that the President has abandoned all principle to get the work of putting a heap of money to work to try to catalyze the economy.
The program whatever its size, will come down to execution vs. contour. The debate over what’s stimulative vs. what’s elitist vs. what’s pork will quiet or grow louder based on how what’s aimed for is actually achieved.
As most of the people in the housing sector would say: It’s a start. Starts mean a lot in housing.
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