Dateline August 27, 2009
Paul Krugman: “Deficits Saved The World”
Dateline November 3, 2004
Paul Krugman: “[The Budget Deficit] is comparable to the worst we’ve ever seen in this country. It’s bigge[r] than Argentina in 2001.”
Deficits for War bad, mmkay, deficits to support an industry that would put me out of a job if it failed are FUCKING GREAT WOOHOO!
So a half billion dollar deficit (circa 2004) is the “worst we’ve ever seen.” A nearly 2 trillion dollar deficit is Woo-fucking-Hoo? Maybe he meant it was the “worst we’ve ever seen” in that “a democrat could totally quadruple that, hit a run right outta the park.”
He goes on to say that it’s not the amount of debt we have, it’s how it compares to our GDP. Guess what Paulie K, our current debt is almost equal to our GDP. Our debt is rising, currently, at a pace of 20% a year. Our GDP… is not… rising. It’s only not sliding backwards thanks to your economist friends massaging the numbers so we don’t have a giant panic in this country. If our debt rises another $9 trillion, that means we’ll have almost $20 trillion in debt. Nearly 2x our GDP. As we haven’t paid off any debt since the Clinton era (remember those social security surpluses we had, that we raided for our illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan?), and before that who knows when the last time we actually paid down debt vs. ran it up?
We’re a nation of minimum-paymenters. Our household debt vs. GDP is already astronomical, in the 300% plus range (last I heard was 350% but that was before a whole lot of write-downs and foreclosures so that money owed may have gone poof). And that’s crippling our country, it’s what helped precipitate this crisis. So the answer must be to get the government debt up to 200% of GDP, so we can have a combined debt of something like 500% of GDP. That’s a 5:1 leverage ratio. Of course, I do believe GDP is poised to shrink, we’re still leaking jobs, and the only reason the “unemployment rate” has gone down a fraction of a percent is people have stopped receiving unemployment, not gotten jobs.
Jobless recovery? Why assume that. I assume jobless fail. All our jobs are going overseas. Fuck man, I got back in touch with one of the Pakistanis that my last job used as their first line of outsourcing. I found out that not only did MY department get outsourced to the Philippines, the Pakistani office got outsourced to the Philippines as well. The pinoys, bless their hearts, did exactly what management wanted them to: blew through calls at an average of two minutes per call. They didn’t really fix anyone’s problems, but that wasn’t something management had to care about at the moment, they wanted zero call time and short calls. A year before, they didn’t care about call time as long as we fixed problems and kept customers happy.
You heard that? My American company fired its Pakistani outsourcees in favor of outsourcing elsewhere. Shit is that fucked up now.
Where’s my piece of the bailout pie, Mr. Krugman? Where’s my piece of my tax dollars I sent to your highly-paid friends. Oh, I know, it’s OWED to them as part of my credit card balance because I’m unemployed still. My former salary is paying 4 or 5 Philippine citizens. At least they’re not huffing glue while being child prostitutes, but that doesn’t help me eat. I don’t get paid for bitching about it either, unlike Krugman, despite the ads on this page. Yeah, I’ve made a buck forty from that in a year, not even enough to cover the transaction cost of getting paid, assuming I can get paid less than 10 bucks, which I can’t.
I’ll leave you with a final gem from the article:
Influential economist Paul Krugman says the US will face a severe downturn before the end of the decade unless the $500 billion fiscal debt is rectified.
And now $2 trillion fiscal debts are the ONLY way to save us from the downturn he predicted based on $500 billion in fiscal debt.
