Quotes from Paul Krugman

Social Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed to be the same thing as a 401(k).

Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.

If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.

Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.

As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.

I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.

open immigration can't exist with a strong social safety net; if you're going to assure healthcare and a decent income to everyone, you can't make that offer global

Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path—fascism.

bothsidesism. It's the insistence that whatever excesses of partisanship you may see on the right have an equivalent on the left, that the way forward to solving America's problems is for good centrists of both parties to come together and work things out. All of this is willfully naïve.

Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

But public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for raising taxes on the rich. One recent poll even found that 45 percent of self-identified Republicans support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion of a top rate of 70 percent.

I don't mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by "movement conservatism," a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

So what does the Green New Deal mean? It's not entirely clear, which is what makes it a good slogan: it could mean a number of good things. But the main thrust, as I understand it, is that we should make a big move to tackle climate change, and that this move should accentuate the positive, not the negative. In particular, it should emphasize investments and subsidies, not carbon taxes.

Look, we've seen this over and over again—three times since 1980. Republicans rail against budget deficits when they're out of power, then drop all their concerns and send the deficit soaring once they are in a position to cut taxes. Then when it's the Democrats' turn, they're expected to clean up the Republicans' red ink rather than address their own priorities. Enough already.

Krugman calculation" that 70 percent of the rise in average family income has gone to the top 1 percent of families.

It's a prime example of a zombie idea—an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.

When people who hold most of the levers of power do the same thing, their fantasizing isn't a delusion, it's a tool: a way to delegitimize opposition, to create excuses not just for disregarding but for punishing anyone who dares to criticize their actions.

Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent.

All it takes are a few billionaires willing to spend a small fraction of their wealth supporting politicians, think tanks—or actually "think" tanks—and partisan media willing to spread the tax-cut virus. That's easily enough to keep the zombies lurching along.

And the decline of unions has made a huge difference. Consider the case of trucking, which used to be a good job but now pays a third less than it did in the 1970s, with terrible working conditions. What made the difference? De-unionization was a big part of the story.

Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing. There are, let's face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet, and congressmen asked, "Are you now or have you ever been?

In both countries the ruling parties—Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary—have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption, and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.

To put this in international perspective, Mississippi now is about as poor relative to the coastal states as Sicily is relative to northern Italy.