A COUPLE OF THINGS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW

Let the New York Times increase your knowledge, at least on these 3 things.  Ignore my comments.  I never even went to college.

1. Republicans must be as pleased as Punch with Obama’s economic program.  The President is following economic policies Republicans consider ideal and have always dreamed they could put in place.

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams. ~ Paul Krugman

And all the time I thought the Republicans were saying cut the strangling over-regulation, stop stifling oil and coal production, stop passing vague laws for your czars to enforce as they see fit, stop threatening to increase the tax burden when things are already slow and stop attacking success.  In other words, just get out of the way.

2. Obama is slashing spending at a rate not seen since the end of the Korean War.

Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War. ~ Paul Krugman

Mr. Krugman provides this link, Mr. Obama a big spender to a couple of charts that he portends prove his point.  The charts do show a sharp decline in the last 12 months, but the charts are not a picture of spending at all.  They are a convoluted measure of growth rates.  To illustrate – If you spend 100% more this year than last, and then 50% more next year than this, and 30% more on top of that in the third year, then the lines on Krugman’s charts would show a dramatic decline while you were actually spending more and more each year.

3. With Barack Obama as President, U.S. borrowing costs are lower than they ever were before in the history of the country.

Well, U.S. borrowing costs have just hit a record low. ~ Paul Krugman

Wags have often said “You can’t make this stuff up”.  Paul Krugman can.  Perhaps that’s why he won a Nobel Prize.