"Beam Me Up Kruggie!"

"Barack Obama?  Barack!?!?  How do you fly this thing?!?!?
I'm crashing quicker than the Economy..." -- Joe Biden

Paul Krugman, that  'New-York-Times-Writing-Nobel-Laureate-Economist-Guy', loved by intellectual Keynesians everywhere, made news last week.  I heard about it, but the story went away without much more than a whimper and a few notations online. 

Now that my electrical power has been restored, my home has re-emerged from Irene's STORM OF THE CENTURY deluge, it's time, once again to turn my one, good (and somewhat jaundiced) eye to those fun-loving Liberals who are so ANXIOUS to spend money we don't have.  

This time they'd like us to be attacked...

By Space Aliens.
(Seriously, I couldn't make this up because YOU'd think I was nuts.  Ah, but who's NUTTY now?  Um, pay no attention to the peanut shells surrounding my desk...)



In case you don't believe what you just saw, here's the transcript from his CNN appearance:

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Think about World War II, right? That was actually negative social product spending, and yet it brought us out.

I mean, probably because you want to put these things together, if we say, "Look, we could use some inflation." Ken and I are both saying that, which is, of course, anathema to a lot of people in Washington but is, in fact, what fhe basic logic says.

It's very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better –
ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you're saying.

KRUGMAN: No, there was a "Twilight Zone" episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

Yes, one more of the 'Smartest guys in the room' opening his yap in front of a camera, immortalized for all time. 

Lest we forget, Paul Krugman is also the intellectual powerhouse who provided 'anyone listening' with the following gems of insight...

"I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it."

"The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round."

"And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real."

And, my personal favorite, from 2002: 

"The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."
(Emphasis added.)

---  PAUL KRUGMAN


Following last week's surprising Earthquake, someone (not me) absconded with one of Paul Krugman's Twitter accounts and posted the following 'as the Nobel-Winner himself':

"People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.” 
Attributed to "Paul Krugman's" Google+ Account

You've got to figure your national perception is pretty bad when someone posts something 'So like you' that everyone assumes that you actually wrote it and that you have become a parody of, well, a parody of yourself. 

Lunch has been completely ingested (but not yet digested) and I must get back to things more economically-fulfilling than this (a.k.a.:  The REAL job).  I'll leave you with a quick-peek at President Obama's Economic Stimulation Plan due to be released in September, so you're not in the dark any longer:

Yeah, you think I'm kidding, but just wait until Galaxtar, President Obama's NEW Jobs Czar, finds out that Jeffrey Immelt, President Obama's current Jobs Czar, sent all those GE jobs to China...

Meet Your NEW Jobs Czar!  "Hail Galaxtar!"

I'm not sure, would this leadership 're-alignment' come under the heading of 'Hope' or 'Change'?

And, It's also shame that Ron Bloom, President Obama's Manufacturing Czar, announced that he's stepping down this month - he and Galaxtar would have been a HOOT at White House Dinners, Staff Meetings, and Golf Outings!

You remember Ron Bloom, don't you?  He's the Capitalism-Loving-Guy who said this:

"We know that the free market is nonsense. ...We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun."

-- Ron Bloom, Obama Administration Manufacturing Czar



Breaking Moos:  President Obama's approval has fallen to yet another record low of 38%.  What are records for, if not for breaking??? 

Not surprisingly, the President is preferred by 'Aliens' 4:1 over any named Republican Candidate! 

Gotta love them Aliens, both Terrestrial, and outer-worldly...  They're the ones who keep the President's approval above the 36% mark. 

"Go then, there are other worlds than these..."  The Dark Tower, Stephen King, 1982