When Zombies Win
Get your shotgun and your NRA card. Brush up on your basic military strategies and prepare to funnel the walking dead into a semicircular killzone, folks. We’re in it for the species!
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 19, 2010
When historians look back at 2008-10,
This is boring. Where are the zombies?
what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas.
And the resurgence of reason beginning on November 2, 2010.
Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything
Let’s make a list of what the free market is right about:
— America
— The Soviet Union languishes for 70 years after eschewing free markets before completely imploding
— Argentina, in tinkering with currencies and destabilizing government, falls from an American contemporary to a minor regional power
— China Vietnam
— Europe continues the drift from free market ideas to socialism. Everything stagnates.
And big government Keynesians have...theories and small sample sizes, I suppose.
— yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.
Screaming teenager to parents: “YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING!!!1! I HATE YOU!” Also, still no zombies.
How did that happen?
Maybe you need to AltaVista search for all those newfangled newsies on the interblogs.
How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees,
Tell anyone who works at a bank that they were unregulated prior to 2008. I dare you. They will knee you in the gut. That might be me projecting.
did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed?
How did we get to the point where the Fed—which has failed (miserably) in every purpose it was originally intended to function—is the sacrosanct Bureau of Bureaucracy in Charge of Economic Growth?
How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes
The economy didn’t begin to take off until 1994, when Republicans swept into congress.
and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth
And Krugman claims Wall Street takes a short-term view to the detriment of the long term…The vast majority of the economy is not a response to government. That’s how we know that we’re still free. The bacchanalian of growth in the dot com bubble was the result of the exuberance of a brand new technology and a geopolitical landscape free from conflict. The 2000s were the opposite: a business climate that had confronted the limitations of the new technology and a far less secure world following 9/11.
even before the crisis
Which happened a mere year and a half after the Democrats retook the congress in 2006.
--did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?
First, there are essentially no new income tax cuts. The tax cuts I assume Krugman is referring to is the estate tax cuts. A confiscatory estate tax has always been a primary goal of socialists since Karl Marx—it is listed in the Communist Manifesto as a necessary precondition for socialism. The American people, as a whole, disdain that idea.
Trying to sell people on paying more taxes so that more of their money can be funneled through the massive inefficiency of the government bureaucracy is inherently a losing argument. Even if you assume no fraud, waste, or corruption in the federal mechanism (a tremendously generous concession on my part, because any apparatus that large attracts terrible people to do terrible things under the banner of virtue), you are expecting people to believe that the central command of the federal government can allocate resources more efficiently than 300 million informed—or even uninformed—consumers. No matter how smart the cabal is, they’re still dumber than the combined masses.
The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama administration show that big-government policies don’t work.
True. What happened to unemployment not going over 8%? Oh, and I’ve officially given up on zombies showing up.
But the response should be, what big-government policies?
Cash for clunkers, the stimulus, the second stimulus, the takeover of GM, the takeover of the student loans industry, Obamacare, FinReg, brinksmanship with increasing taxes, threats against opposition, airport pat-downs, Pigford, the latest [thankfully defeated] budget monstrosity, government funded propaganda, and colossal cronyism. Even if some of these programs haven’t gone into effect yet, they have gone into effect on the American economy. Business owners aren’t stupid. They can see what’s coming down the pike, especially with Obamacare (at least, those not well connected enough to get waivers). The market has priced that uncertainty, and it has forced people to sit on their money.
For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts —
Since tax cuts can’t actually cost the government anything, I’m going to assume that this number, like all the other numbers about the cost of tax cuts, are figments of some progressive’s imagination.
was far too cautious to turn the economy around.
So you keep saying. Yet the people who drive the economy, the people who invest in new facilities, hire new employees, start new businesses, are intrinsically connected to the popular uprising that took place this year that staunchly said no to more stimulus. Indeed the waste of the Stimulus was the rallying cry for the conservative movement to turn out the Tea Party, which, if the New York Times is to be believed (and it isn’t) is prominently affluent. Even Krugman wouldn’t discount that the affluent are the people who make the decisions regarding more hiring.
And that’s not 20-20 hindsight:
It’s not 20-20 at all. And this is a place for a semicolon, not a colon.
many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate.
No, Paul, "grossly inadequate" was just the recurring theme from your latest attempt at couples' counseling. What’s that old joke about the one-handed economist?
Put it this way:
Your license to use colons has been revoked under penalty of zombie attack.
A policy under which government employment actually fell,
This literally took me all of 17 seconds to google.
Year | Executive branch civilians (thousands) | Uniformed military personnel (thousands) | Legislative and judicial branch personnel (thousands) | Total Federal personnel (thousands) |
2000 4 | 2,639 | 1,426 | 63 | 4,129 |
2001 4 | 2,640 | 1,428 | 64 | 4,132 |
2002 | 2,630 | 1,456 | 66 | 4,152 |
2003 | 2,666 | 1,478 | 65 | 4,210 |
2004 | 2,650 | 1,473 | 64 | 4,187 |
2005 | 2,636 | 1,436 | 65 | 4,138 |
2006 | 2,637 | 1,432 | 63 | 4,133 |
2007 | 2,636 | 1,427 | 63 | 4,127 |
2008 | 2,692 | 1,450 | 64 | 4,206 |
2009 | 2,774 | 1,591 | 66 | 4,430 |
under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years,
Google can neither confirm nor deny. OECD data not available after 2008. Damn you, Google. That said, total spending isn’t a pretty picture.
hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.
Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government.
Does this guy even pay attention to politics? In 2008 Obama had 70% approval ratings and massive majorities in both houses of congress. He could have had whatever he wanted.
But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.
Except that it’s not true, which must mean that it demonstrates the continuing fear of putting the largest economy the world has ever known in a lab with pointy-heads like Krugman who will use our debt capacity like it’s Christmas morning.
It’s also worth pointing out that everything the right said about why Obamanomics would fail was wrong.
I’m starting to imagine Paul Krugman as that Britney Spears defender sobbing uncontrollably and the unfairness of the harsh attacks on Keynesian economics. “Leave Keynesianism alone! LEAVE IT ALONE!!!”
For two years we’ve been warned that government borrowing would send interest rates sky-high;
You’ve been warned that will happen well after you’ve broken the economy. Interest rate spikes in Greece , Iceland , and Ireland
in fact, rates have fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about recovery, but stayed consistently low by historical standards.
This is asinine. Rates are low because of Federal Reserve open market activities. Krugman knows this. I know this. You know this. The dim-witted social worker down the street knows this. Your elementary school child knows this. It remains unclear whether a wood beam knows about the open market activities, but even with the massive injection of money into government securities that came with FOMC and quantitative easing, the government’s still having problems keeping interest rates low.
For two years we’ve been warned that inflation, even hyperinflation, was just around the corner;
Still is, if the economy ever starts growing again.
instead, disinflation has continued, with core inflation — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — now at a half-century low.
But still above zero (in fact, .9% above zero as of Nov. 24), which is the definition of “not deflation.”
The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as they have about events in America
This is about the three hundredth dash in this article. Am I going to have to revoke a permit for those too?
and suffered equally few consequences. “Ireland
Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is now Britain
And in his new position, he’s setting out to emulate the austerity policies Ireland
Irish austerity measures were like telling a patient in the middle of a coronary to eat a salad. Of course the austerity measures didn’t work for a country in the grips of crisis. That doesn’t mean that eating a salad is bad for you.
After all, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a resounding success. “The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 — and it’s working now,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again
Amazingly, Ireland is the only place in Europe I don’t recall seeing riots over austerity measures.
But such failures don’t seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t,
Keynesian economics?
we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by “zombie economics.”
Holy crap! Zombies! Call Bruce Campbell! I knew it. Never let down your guard against zombies.
Why?
Don’t blame me. I’ve got my chainsaw and shotgun handy and an escape route to a defensible position with plenty of food and water all mapped out. That defensible position? Australia
Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead.
They can approach the zombies as non-threatening co-inhabitants, because zombies are only interested in eating people with brains.
And this is especially, though not only, true of the president.
So true.
People tend to forget that Ronald Reagan often gave ground on policy substance — most notably, he ended up enacting multiple tax increases.
$275M of tax cuts vs. $132.7M of tax increases. Plus he negotiated the tax increases for cuts to domestic discretionary spending. Big win. Huge. I’m a fan. Call me, Ronald. We’ll do lunch. Wait…is he a zombie?
But he never wavered on ideas, never backed down from the position that his ideology was right and his opponents were wrong.
Of course, he had the added benefit of being the standard-bearer for an ideology that was right, and had the notable bonus of opponents who were wrong.
President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the aisle
Pre-election 2010: [data not found].
by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?),
Have you ever read David Brooks’ column?
adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten its belt even in the face of recession,
Because that’s the stuff that leaders are made of: rhetoric!
offered symbolic freezes on spending and federal wages.
Reduce spending and wages to 1988 levels and we’re talking.
None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist.
He is.
But it helped empower bad ideas,
His own.
in ways that can do quite immediate harm.
No argument here.
Right now Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy — but Republicans are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects from the deal.
Unless, of course, you’re a reasonable person who knows that economic growth comes from production and innovation, not from hollow spending.
And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?
Excellent point. I think he should capitulate to the Republicans or face being branded a hypocrite.
Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies.
No snark necessary here. Can’t you just feel the disdain dripping from his pen?
But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas.
Unless you have the proverbial “Shotgun of Truth.” No, you can’t have it. It’s private property. You can nationalize it when you pry it from my cold dead brain matter.
When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.
That’s the best zombie reference you’ve got? I’ve made three references to shotguns and one to Bruce Campbell. Stop embarrassing yourself, Paul Krugman.
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