KRUGMAN’S KIND OF KOMMON SENSE

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Justice Samuel Alito is a Princeton graduate and very proud of it. Nevertheless, if memory serves me right, he said he heard more common sense when talking to one man in the street than he heard from all the Princeton elites. Personally, I suspect the judge must have been thinking of Joe the Plumber and Paul Krugman at the time.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Krugman writes that we are seeing “what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it.” Shades of Rahm Emmanuel and his “We must not let this crisis go to waste”? Not at all. That would be common sense. In Krugman’s Princetonian mind, unemployment is the crisis, more debt is the solution and opposing debt is exploitation. If you find that confusing, it’s because you have common sense.

Standard & Poor warned that if something wasn’t done to curb the federal debt it could lead to a reduction of the credit rating. When an agreement was reached that prompted an immediate increase in debt with no more than promises to reduce spending the stock market took a plunge. Every householder knows that a credit rating is based on a combination payment history and outstanding debt. But as Krugman sees it, when the markets tanked, they “were signaling, as clearly as anyone could ask, that unemployment rather than deficits is our biggest problem.” In other words, to improve your credit rating you must increase your debt.

The elite economist closes with “The usual suspects will, of course, denounce such ideas as irresponsible.” No, Paul, such ideas are not irresponsible, they’re just plain stupid. Have you no common sense?