Quotes from Paul Krugman

People generally like the idea of being able to buy into Medicare, but not the idea of being required to give up private insurance if they're happy with it.)

It is a bad thing to be in a recession, and a good thing to recover, but one should never confuse the rapid growth that takes place during a recovery with an improvement in the economy's long-term performance: once the economy is near capacity, growth is bound to slow down. Moreover, recessions and recoveries depend far more on the Federal Reserve than on the administration in power, and happen to Republicans and Democrats alike.

Businesspeople are not used to thinking about closed systems;economists are.

I joked back in the summer of 2011 that what we really need right now is a fake threat of alien invasion that leads to massive spending on anti-alien defense

The basic proposition that the "Krugman calculation" was meant to convey is that income inequality has been increasing so rapidly that most families have failed to get much benefit out of long-term growth. This proposition stands. One need not take seriously the efforts by supply-siders to chop the past fifteen years into little slices, and claim the good ones while disclaiming the bad ones.

It's obvious, it's wrong, and anyway they said it years ago.

the modern Republican Party is dominated by "movement conservatism," a monolithic structure held together by big money—often deployed stealthily—and the closed intellectual ecosystem of Fox News and other partisan media. And the people who rise within this movement are, to a far greater degree than those on the other side, apparatchiks, political loyalists who can be counted on not to stray from the party line.

I've noted in the past how strange it is that conservatives have total faith in the power and flexibility of market economies, but claim that these economies will be completely destroyed if the government creates incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What's remarkable about this prospect is that the wall is an utterly stupid idea. Even if you're bitterly opposed to immigration, legal or otherwise, spending tens of billions of dollars on an ostentatious physical barrier is neither a necessary nor an effective way to stop immigrants from coming.

The answer to these questions, I'd argue, is that there are actually three major motives behind Trumpist policy, which we can label Manhood, McConnell, and Moola.

It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent.

Tax cuts for the rich are the G.O.P.'s defining policy, but two-thirds of voters believe that taxes on the rich are actually too low, while only 7 percent believe that they're too high. Voters support Elizabeth Warren's proposed tax on large fortunes by a three-to-one majority. Only a small minority want to see cuts in Medicaid, even though such cuts have been central to every G.O.P. health care proposal in recent years.

I hear that several journalists were very angry after I joked in my column that if Bush said the world was flat, the headline on the news analysis would read 'Shape of Earth: Views Differ' --- each of the journalists thought I was making fun of him.

Le depressioni, l'inflazione galoppante o la guerra civile possono rendere un paese povero, ma solo l'aumento di produttività può renderlo ricco.

while we may congratulate ourselves on the strength of our political institutions, in the end institutions consist of people and fulfill their roles only as long as the people in them respect their intended purpose. Rule of law depends not just on what is written down, but also on the behavior of those who interpret and enforce that rule.

It is important," said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, "to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes"—some of them, he declared, "swollen beyond all healthy limits.

Today we are once again living in an era of extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people, with the net worth of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans almost equal to that of the bottom 90 percent combined.

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. That divergence was politics, pure and simple.

What Americans who support "socialism" actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: a market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.

The decline of unions, which covered a quarter of private-sector workers in 1973 but only 6 percent now, may not be as obviously political. But other countries haven't seen the same kind of decline. Canada is as unionized now as the U.S. was in 1973; in the Nordic nations unions cover two-thirds of the work force. What made America exceptional was a political environment deeply hostile to labor organizing and friendly toward union-busting employers.

The next time you hear businesspeople propounding their views about the economy, ask yourself. Have they taken the time to study this subject? Have they read what the experts write?If not, never mind how successful they have been in business. Ignore them, because they probably have no idea what they are talking about.

On the other hand, we should never discount the power of dishonesty. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky, and millions of people will believe them. Let's just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn't radical at all.

cita de Daniel Patrick Moynihan, «todo el mundo tiene derecho a tener su propia opinión, pero no sus propios hechos»

Democrats have a network of think tanks and sympathetic independent experts who look hard at evidence, try to devise solutions to real problems, and sometime affect actual legislative proposals. Republicans have nothing comparable; their tame "experts" are basically in the business of saying whatever their political masters want to hear.