Krugman: Where Are The Deficit Celebrations?

Krugman: Where Are The Deficit Celebrations?

For three years and more Beltway politics has been all about the deficit. Urgent action was needed to avert crisis. A Grand Bargain absolutely had to be reached. Fix the Debt, now now now!

So where are the celebrations now that the debt issue looks, if not solved, at least greatly mitigated? And it’s not just recovering revenues: health costs, the biggest driver of long-run spending, have slowed dramatically

Maybe they didn’t actually care about debt and deficit? Maybe the people who said nothing while W grew the debt don’t care about fiscal issues at all. They care about cutting the parts of the state that provide services for the bottom 99% and transferring that wealth to the top 1%

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Do you want to know where all that education money is going? Looks like it isn’t going to education. School sports, the original edu-tainment industry. motherjones: foulmouthedliberty: poptech: And the highest paid public employee in your state is… Just be you, Vermont.

Krugman: Not Everything Is Political

Krugman: Not Everything Is Political

in practice it turns out that many conservatives are unwilling to concede that Keynesian macro has any validity to it, or that you can sometimes run the printing presses without unleashing runaway inflation, because they fear that any such admission would open the doors to much wider government intervention. But that’s exactly my point! They’re letting their views about how the world works be dictated by their vision of the kind of society they want; they’re politicizing their economic analysis. And that’s why they keep getting everything wrong.

This is why we can not have a policy discussion. Because one side doesn’t care about how the world actually works, only the kind of world they wish to live in.

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Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover. Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is… Continue reading Untitled

Why I wish my daughter had been vaccinated

Why I wish my daughter had been vaccinated

until she caught pertussis – which turns out to mean whooping cough. Which turns out to mean months of pain. It is a highly contagious disease that comes in stages, but that horrible, hacking cough that kept her up all night went on for so many weeks that she was prescribed an inhaler. She was past her first birthday, so unlikely to die of it, like newborns can, but it’s disgusting to watch your child needlessly suffer like that. My parents had to come to help us, and then we grownups all succumbed to the revolting condition too. Of course, having wanted to avoid filling her body with chemicals, I ended up giving her all the medicines I could find.

This is just sad. Convinced of grand conspiracies and alternative health, she keep her child unvaccinated and that results in months of suffering and pain.

Conservatives Had Better Hope George W. Bush Was a Dummy

Conservatives Had Better Hope George W. Bush Was a Dummy

if conservatives want us to believe that the United States blundered through a major terrorist attack, two major failed military adventures, dismal economic performance, and then finally an epic economic collpase all while under the watch of a very bright and attentive leader then it seems like a much deeper failure of the movement.