In his column this morning Krugman tries to claim we haven’t really become a big spending nation. In response to an email request from The Blaze I fired off a quick note addressing the mistruths, as cited below:
So is the picture as rosy as Krugman paints? Not exactly. I asked Anthony Randazzo of Reason to weigh in. He got fired up and e-mailed a dinner-sized critique.
The main course:
“A couple of problems he doesn’t address, first is that no matter how he wants to say spending has worked, we’re running multi-trillion deficits, that’s a fact hard to get away with, and second we have serious deficits projected over the next 10 years, THAT is what people are complaining about. Second is that people complain about government spending to create jobs because it has never worked in a sustainable way anywhere, excuse us for pre-empting the failed stimulus with pronouncements of its failure in 2008. Third it is all a matter of scale with Krugman here, because I think the $400 billion or so already out the door on spending projects and tax cuts is a [crap load of] cash, even it if isn’t “that big” relative to the size of the economy.”
With a side of this:
“Krugman is complaining about cooked numbers? Seriously? Krugman. In a hyper-partisan column space he is complaining about others who interpret data to meet their own political ends? Really?”
This:
“Krugman, if gov’t can create jobs so well, then why not just have the government employ everyone?”
And this:
“The number of governmnet jobs and percentage of union labor in public unions HAVE both been on the rise. Heritage and Cato have documented it well.”
Finally, dessert:
“Krugman has been talking like this for the past 18 months, its the same thing over and over again: we just didn’t spend enough. Japan tried that 10 times with 10 different stimulus packages under the same logic—and they still got a lost decade.”
See the whole blog post from Blazer Jonathan Seidl here.
Here’s Cato on government workers.
Here’s Heritage on public sector unions.
And, not to be outdone, Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh on the power of government workers from the October issue of Reason magainze.