This Republican Economy

[bhunter]

Originally Posted by icenine

You seem unable to refute his arguments with a sort of coherent thesis...your posts seem to be of the "oh your crazy that is bunch of crap" sort of shrug off......Obama may have saved Michigan and Ohio's economy at the very least by bailing out the Big Three. I guess that is a negative for you since your from Michigan....

We are living in your trickle down world buddy, and your friends control the House.....what's wrong not happy?

Oh the crash didn't occur under Bush...and Bush didn't bail out the banks...I see now....

IMHO, Krugman loves to redefine meanings and cherry pick to obtain the results that he seeks.

On Krugman on Spending

by Don Boudreaux on June 4, 2012

in Budget Issues, Myths and Fallacies, Reality Is Not Optional, Stimulus

Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

Paul Krugman writes that “Adjusted for population growth and inflation, [local, state, and federal government] spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War” (“The Republican Economy,” June 4). This claim is highly questionable.
Although he doesn’t specify his meaning of “recently,” he must not have in mind the years since the current downturn began. After all, inflation-adjusted total government spending per capita is five percent higher today than it was in 2008.

Elsewhere in his column, though, Mr. Krugman suggests that he’s thinking back only to 2009. It’s true that such projected spending for 2012 will be down by just under five percent from its 2009 level, but this statistic is largely an artifact of the huge – nearly 11 percent in a single year – spike in such spending that occurred in 2009 over 2008. Compared to the average of such annual spending for the ten-year period 2003-2012, spending in 2012 is higher by 5.6 percent. More significantly, compared to the average of such annual spending for the decade leading up to the downturn (1999-2008), such spending in 2012 is higher by 17 percent.*

Mr. Krugman misleads your readers by asserting that real total government spending today, adjusted for population growth, has been “slashed.”

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University