Obamacare update

Now that the initial Obamacare enrollment is in the cards, Krugman has been doing a victory lap on it's success. He is especially gleeful since he admits the roll-out was terrible but that liberals saw the problem and worked hard to correct.

Krugman and his Nobel, Economists who have been wrong, and North Carolina jobs

Krugman writes at length on whether he or other laureates should be given more visibility since they won prestigious prizes. His point is yes maybe they should be given a forum but if they continue to get things wrong then that should be the end of them in the public arena.

It is always fun when Krugman goes back a couple years to look at what people said and then show how now they been proved wrong and he’s been right. In this post Krugman writes how in 2010 Ken Rogoff attacks those who wanted more fiscal stimulus and said that those people who advocated against austerity would be wrong about more recessions. Krugman then breaks out with a chart showing more recessions in Europe since 2010.   

Another favorite topic is when Krugman and the WSJ go mano-a-mano over the same issue. Recently it was over lower unemployment in North Carolina. It seems NC allowed many people’s UI benefits to end. The WSJ pointed out that this eventually lowered the NC UE rate, Krugman doesn't dispute but says the rate went lower since more people just stopped looking for work and thus are no longer counted in the UE rate.

Dem some fighting words!

Not even a week ago Krugman posted that anyone who says he advocated a housing bubble in 2002 to offset the internet bubble of the late '90's is both a fool and liar. So now in today's main editorial in the WSJ  about the legacy of Ben Bernanke did they throw the gauntlet down with this line -- "Mr. Greenspan nonetheless followed the advice of Paul Krugman to promote a housing bubble to offset the dot-com crash."  Precious.

Krugman vs WSJ & Stephens - it gets nasty!

Krugman and WSJ columnist Bret Stephens are in a slug fest. It should be noted that Stephens won the Pulitzer Prize in last year - so this is quite high profile.

It started when Stephens blasted Obama for a economic inequality speech. Not quite sure why Stephens was even writing about this since he focuses on foreign policy but evidently he made a big mistake - he used nominal figures to show higher incomes for poor folk instead of using inflation-adjusted numbers. When using inflation adjusted then there was no increase for the poor. Of course Krugman jumped all over this since he's been focusing on inequality lately. Stephens admitted his error but still said it was an innocent mistake that doesn't change his basic hypothesis that all Americans are enjoying rising incomes, using CBO data to back it up.  Interestingly enough Krugman also uses this data to back his claim that the same data shows rising inequality.

Then for Krugman's regular weekly column his told the story again how Stephens used the wrong data to give proof that conservatives are purposely using confusing data and the WSJ didn't issue a correction. This, of course, send Stephens through the roof and he responded in his regular column that Krugman is bully and why hasn't Krugman issued corrections for saying in 2002 that Greenspan should start a housing bubble or that Europe is an economic success in 2010. Krugman then responded WTF... that was not a correction since it wasn't posted to the original article, just in an on-line post.

exciting stuff!

Krugman is really mad at the Washington Post

This is the just latest time that Krugman has bashed the Washington Post. He can't believe they published a news article that claimed the Ryan/Murray budget deal is a budget buster. He says how the one 'expert' mentioned in the article is really a deficit hawk (not a true unbiased analyst) and why could they have not also gotten a quote from an expert who doesn't believe deficits are a problem. Krugman provides some data from the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) that shows deficits are not a growing concern.

The future, economics and the Great Recession, Cochrane has no credibility -- and a little turkey defense

Krugman tells us he believes that the world could be on the cusp of major technological breakthroughs. Some examples are self-driving cars, good, automatic translation, computer speech recognition, etc. Krugman's post is in response to some people saying technological innovation is coming to an end.

Krugman then has a couple posts defending economics (specifically main street, textbook macroeconomics). He says that this standard economics had a good model for the economic crash and what to do for recovery – namely have governments spend more money while interest rates are very low and other participants in the economy are not spending. He ends one post with quite a zinger saying the problem was not with economics but with some economists who decided to turn their back on standard macro and we should go back and review the old classical economics texts.

For Thanksgiving, Krugman refutes a half in jest post about how people hate turkey because chicken is way more popular. Krugman says bogus – it’s just that chicken is much more convenient…

Krugman goes on quite a riff against John Cochrane who claimed four years that inflation was a danger – but now that no inflation has come - has yet to admit he’s wrong or revise his model. Krugman states quite clearly that this should reduce Cochrane’s credibility.

Mean for the sake of mean and ObamaCare

One thing that really sets Krugman off is when officials take policy positions that cause hardship on people when there is no justification for it. His recent example calls out the head of the German Central Bank for saying that printing money is not the way to get out of the financial crisis. Krugman is flabbergasted since he says there is no grounds for this argument as a higher inflation rate would help alleviate the situation. Krugman can't understand the desire for these officials to cause pain when solutions exist that will not cause pain and suffering.

Krugman points out that the latest estimates are that healthcare costs are slowing and some of this may be due to the implementation of Obamacare.

Also on Obamacare he agrees the roll-out has been a disaster but he feels the technical glitches will get worked out quickly. The big story though is that more and more people are getting access to affordable healthcare and that will be the story that will dominate the elections next year -- so the Republicans if they continue to rail against it will be on the losing side.