Quotes from Paul Krugman

Any political analyst who didn't see this coming should find a different profession. After all, "starve the beast"—cut taxes on the rich, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse to hack away at the safety net—has been G.O.P. strategy for decades.

Why is it so hard to say clearly that privatization would worsen, not improve, Social Security's finances?

Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.

Political scientists studying the behavior of billionaires find that while many of them push for lower taxes, they do so more or less in secret, presumably because they realize just how unpopular their position really is. This "stealth politics" is, by the way, one reason billionaires can seem much more liberal than they actually are—only the handful of liberals among them speak out in public.

memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds

social democracy"—a market economy, but with a strong public social safety net and regulations that limit the range of actions businesses can take in pursuit of profit.

This book, then, tells a story of the fight for truth, justice, and the anti-zombie way. I don't know if that fight can ever be fully won, although it can be lost. But it's definitely a cause worth fighting for.

Above all, he took America to war on false pretenses, and hundreds of thousands died as a result. Seeing voters reward that vileness was not a happy thing.

So Bush won reelection, as I used to joke, by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists.

Tal vez no necesitaríamos la Seguridad Social si la gente corriente fuese de verdad tan perfectamente racional y tuviese tanta visión de futuro como a los economistas les gusta suponer en sus modelos (y a la gente de derechas en su propaganda).

And Milton Friedman was wrong: in the face of a really big shock, which pushes the economy into a liquidity trap, the central bank can't prevent a depression.

Incentives aren't the only thing that matter for economic growth. Opportunity is also crucial, and extreme inequality deprives many people of the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and government programs that reduce inequality can make the nation as a whole richer by reducing that waste.

news media are either propaganda organs or desperately afraid of declaring, in any straightforward way, that politicians are wrong, no matter how much what they say is at odds with the truth.

If reports about a candidate talk about how something "raises questions," creates "shadows," or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe—and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

In practice, you can't be a modern Republican in good standing unless you deny the reality of global warming, assert that it has natural causes, or insist that nothing can be done about it without destroying the economy. You also have to either accept or acquiesce in wild claims that the overwhelming evidence for climate change is a hoax, that it has been fabricated by a vast global conspiracy of scientists. Why

we're now ruled by people who are willing to endanger civilization for the sake of political expediency, not to mention increased profits for their fossil-fuel friends. About

In other words, in American political discourse, anyone who wants to make life in a market economy less nasty, brutish, and short gets denounced as a socialist.

But climate change isn't just killing people; it may well kill civilization.

Republicans don't just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results—which seems all too likely—it won't be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing, and intimidation.

Programmers have a saying: garbage in, garbage out.

The answer, I submit, is that the G.O.P. is an authoritarian regime in waiting. Trump himself clearly has the same instincts as the foreign dictators he so openly admires. He demands that public officials be loyal to him personally, not to the American people. He threatens political opponents with retribution—two years after the last election, he's still leading chants of "Lock her up." He attacks the news media as enemies of the people.

What they don't point out explicitly is that with the exception of A.C.A. repeal, Democrats err in the same direction as Republicans, just less so. Specifically, both parties believe that the public is to the right of where it really is.