The election is 36 days away, and most of the media are churning out their profiles of undecided voters in Ohio and polling snapshots. Only Paul Krugman has broken the illusion, moved past the election and its expected outcome, and focused on the expected policy prescription that lies ahead, the desire of most of official Washington to slash the budget along the lines of a proposal that gets far more credit than it deserves. Krugman, a voice outside Washington, has no problem explaining to everyone that the Bowles-Simpson plan actually stinks.

Paul Krugman writes on the meaning of Paul Ryan’s lying about his marathon time. It fits with Ryan’s dictating inputs for the CBO analysis of Ryan’s budget, then claiming the CBO rated it. “It’s like sneaking into a marathon near the finish line, then claiming victory.”

It’s hard to even pack all of the falsehoods in Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story into one post, so I’ll have to outsource some of this. But it helps to know that Niall Ferguson is too often wrong about economics.

President Obama wants to try principal reduction as a way to help home owners and the economy, but the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which would be responsible for implementing a key part of this policy, doesn’t like principal reduction. As acting director of FHFA, DeMarco has decided that gives him the right to set government policy based on his personal preferences. The illustrates how important it is for an administration to get it’s own people in place.

As the still-unfolding recession leads to a disturbing preponderance of PhD’s working at Subway, there is one increasingly infuriating bright spot of iron-clad job security: the op/ed page of your local newspaper.  Once upon a time, the op/ed page became my favorite part of the newspaper; as the third kid out of four, I seldom [...]

A few weeks back, the respected Martin Wolf wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times in which he lamented the inability of Europe’s elites to stop an inexorable collapse of the Euro monetary union. This one was widely noted not only because it was Martin Wolf saying it, but because of how he said it.

The New York Times allowed Matthew Bishop to write its review of Paul Krugman’s new book, End This Depression Now! Mr. Bishop is The US Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of the Economist, a very serious paper. Mr. Bishop himself is a Very Serious Person, although he doesn’t seem to understand the point of that term, and he takes umbrage

For nearly a week the media has been pressured to focus on an irrelevant distraction involving President Obama’s silly claim that the “private sector is fine,” when he obviously meant to say something that is self evident. But they’re missing the economic and political story of the decade.

What they seem unable to grasp is that when an economy gets shut down, somebody has to prime the pump to get it flowing again. By definition, that has to be the government, since they have the authority to print money and the ability to borrow money at the lowest possible interest rates.

From today’s Krugman column, it’s very clear that government expenditures began falling in 2010 and have not abated. We have had a growing investment gap since that time. Krugman helps let Obama off the hook, as part of the problem was how the GOP wouldn’t let him spend more. But he points out that the stimulus mostly ran out in 2010, at which point Democrats still held Congress. And as we’ve seen, the Obama Administration is heavily invested in letting everyone know that spending has decreased on their watch.