Like one of those football mascots — a poor, sweaty guy dressed up in a giant fuzzy costume of a shark or an eagle (or whatever his team’s symbol is) — Paul Krugman is dancing and clowning around in the field and among the fans trying to whip up martial enthusiasm, during an intermission in the main event while the real players have taken a break in bashing each other to bits.
Krugman is the Democrat’s mascot, a guy in a giant fuzzy Ivy League economist costume.
In his latest op-ed for the New York Times (November 11th, 2001), his transformation of economic analysis into cheerleading is to simply catalog all the provisions in the various contested Republican/Democratic/House/Senate “stimulus” bills and to shout — not to reason, not to explain, not to argue, but simply to shout (he can do that, after all, because he is wearing a giant fuzzy Ivy League economist costume, and this is half-time) — that everything in the Democratic versions is virtuous (or that its few flaws are “secondary”), while everything in the Republican versions is corrupt.
He’s clever enough as a rhetorician to have hit upon a credible theme — that the September 11 attacks have given legislators the opportunity to use the crisis as an excuse for pushing through whatever agendas they had all along. True enough — but here’s the problem.
First, that logic is a sword that cuts both ways. It is true for both parties, so Krugman is in the embarrassing position of having to acknowledge some of the worst excesses of the Democrats’ efforts along these lines and dismiss them as merely “secondary,” whatever that means
But more important, this logic rests on a false presumption that anything a legislator was trying to do before the attacks is, perforce, somehow tainted simply because of its position in time, and is now forever ineligible for legitimacy. That logic illegitimizes any pro-growth or stimulative economic agenda advanced before the attack. Yet if stimulus is what we all want and need now, then those pre-attack ideas are all the more legitimate. Supply-side tax cuts, for example, are no less legitimate for having been considered earlier.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m criticizing Krugman for his partisan cheerleading, but I’m not much more a fan of the Republican proposals than I am of the Democratic ones. The fact is they’re both garbage heaps of pork, boondoggles, and welfare hand-outs both corporate and individual. But at least I acknowledge that there are a few tiny pro-growth particles that managed to survive on the Republican side of the garbage heap, and I don’t disqualify them simply because they are ideas propounded before September 11.
This logic not only punishes those whose good ideas happened to pre-date an event that brought them into fashion by sheer luck — worse, it punishes those whose ideas actually correctly predicted the current crisis. For example, many have argued that the US should strive for greater energy self-sufficiency by opening up more drilling in Alaska’s wilderness. There are arguments against that, to be sure — but who can doubt that the range of possible policy responses to the September 11 attacks would be far greater today if we had done that years ago, and were less dependent on Middle East oil?
Yet Krugman’s arrogant confidence in his own credibility is so great that he doesn’t merely try to hide this logical flaw in his argument — he hides it in plain sight, concluding his op-ed by saying, “Oh, by the way: the administration is once again pushing for drilling in the Arctic. You see, it’s essential to the fight against terrorism.”
Krugman has reached the point where he, and the “newspaper of record” that hosts him, think that the sarcasm of a man dressed in an economist costume is a substitute for reasoning or the application of the economic science for which he was hired in the first place. I’d be surprised if even the New York Times is willing to carry Krugman’s column much longer. It’s becoming an outright embarrassment.
