Paul Krugman Slams Bernie Sanders Again!!

This is the fifth hit on Bernie by Krugman in the last week. (SEE here, here, here and here).

On Friday night, he posted this chart of the last 57 years of GDP growth versus Bernie Sanders projections of the future and labeled the post Plausibility:

Hey, maybe Krugman really did deserve the Nobel Prize.

I almost want Hillary to win just so that I can see what post Krugman gets.

-RW

Krugman Goes Nuclear on Bernie Sanders

After three attack blog posts against Bernie economics, yes three (SEE here, here and here.), Paul Krugman has used his entire Friday op-ed column to attack Sanders.

This is sweet:

On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Mr. Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”

That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.

The claims the economists are talking about come from Mr. Friedman’s analysis of the Sanders economic program. The good news is that this isn’t the campaign’s official assessment; the bad news is that the Friedman analysis has been highly praised by campaign officials.

And the analysis is really something. The Republican candidates have been widely and rightly mocked for their escalating claims that they can achieve incredible economic growth, starting with Jeb Bush’s promise to double growth to 4 percent and heading up from there. But Mr. Friedman outdoes the G.O.P. by claiming that the Sanders plan would produce 5.3 percent growth a year over the next decade...

Sorry, but there’s just no way to justify this stuff. For wonks like me, it is, frankly, horrifying...

The point is that if you dismiss the likes of Mr. Krueger or Ms. Romer as Hillary shills or compromised members of the “establishment,” you’re excommunicating most of the policy experts who should be your allies.

So Mr. Sanders really needs to crack down on his campaign’s instinct to lash out. More than that, he needs to disassociate himself from voodoo of the left — not just because of the political risks, but because getting real is or ought to be a core progressive value.

Of course, this is coming from Krugman, a major league interventionist, so it doesn't have the full explosive power of a free market critique of Sanders. Krugman's value here is that he can get past the palace guards and unload on the socialist from close range, the damn op-ed page of The New York Times!

-RW

Krugman Attacks Sanders, Again

This is the third attack on Bernie Sanders by Paul Krugman in the last 48 hours.

He writes:

Matthew Yglesias says that the Sanders campaign won’t care about the warnings from top Democratic economists that its numbers are nonsense, and that it doesn’t need to care. That may or may not be true — my guess is that making growth claims that are even more outlandish than those of the Republicans, and having made it impossible for progressive policy experts to offer a full-throated defense of your position, would do more harm in a general election than he imagines....

So I hope that the Sanders campaign doesn’t just brush off this criticism as the “establishment” doing its corrupt thing, and realizes that it really is in danger of losing not just an election but an important part of what it should be standing for.

Sanders should be attacked, so I don't mind this at all.

  -RW

Krugmam Slams Bernie (Part 2)

Paul Krugman writes:

Four former Democratic chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers have put out a letter warning that Bernie Sanders’s economic program contains a very worrisome amount of voodoo...

In Sanders’s case, I don’t think it’s ideology as much as being not ready for prime time — and also of not being willing to face up to the reality that the kind of drastic changes he’s proposing, no matter how desirable, would produce a lot of losers as well as winners.

What Krugman is  saying is true, but truth has never been the guiding light of his commentary? Is this the first hint that Hillary has him penciled in for a serious post in the administration?

Chairman of the CEA? Fed chair?

 -RW

Also see: Krugman Smashes Bernie Sanders Economic Projections

Krugman Smashes Bernie Sanders Economic Projections

There is some fun Bernie bashing on the left.

As a follow up to the open letter by four Presidential Economic Advisers blasting Bernie Sanders claims, Paul Krugman takes a nice swipe at Bernie:

The open letter to Sanders and Friedman by former CEA chairs didn’t get into specifics, and I’m already hearing from Bernie supporters accusing them of arrogance, or high-handedness, or something. But here’s what Friedman has said, in what the campaign’s policy director calls “outstanding work”:

– Real growth at 5.3 percent a year, versus a baseline of around 2
– Labor force participation rate back to 1999 level
– 3.8 percent unemployment

OK, progressives have, rightly, mocked Jeb Bush for claiming that he could double growth to 4 percent. Now people close to Sanders say 5.3???...

The point is not that all of this is impossible, but it’s very unlikely — and these are numbers we would describe as deep voodoo if they came from a tax-cutting Republican.

Sanders needs to disassociate himself from this kind of fantasy economics right now. 

 -RW

Positively Disgusting

Paul Krugman writes this outrageous paragraph today:

One of the really great moments in the Democratic debate, at least for those of us who think America can learn from other countries, was the exchange over Denmark. Bernie Sanders said he wants America to become like Denmark; Hillary Clinton was a bit skeptical, but agreed that Denmark is a good role model. And it is! Denmark has combined high taxes and strong social benefits (free college, heavily subsidized child care, and more) with strong employment and high productivity. It shows that strong welfare states can work.

Krugman knows better,

Here are some of the facts about Denmark, this centrally planned utopia (via Per Henrik Hansen ):

Despite its reputation as a showcase of political utopia, 40 percent of its adult population live on government transfer income, full-time, all-year.
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[T]hose with only 9 years of education, in Denmark it is 34 percent, whereas in the U.S. it is 14 percent. In Sweden the number is 26 percent and in Norway 18 percent. Again the numbers are much more favorable in the U.S.
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In Denmark, many people are prevented from gaining the education they would like. All higher education is publicly run and free. Central planners decide how many doctors, architects, engineers, lawyers, economists, etc., that society needs. Students are rationed according to their grades in high school. If your grades are not high enough, you may not begin a degree program of your preference.
There are no objective tests of the quality levels in Denmark that I know of. However, one indication of the falling quality level in education could be the considerable shift in applicants for higher education away from the sciences and into the humanities. Everything involving mathematics, or other clearly demonstrable skills such as natural science or economics, is disliked by the applicants.
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Denmark is one of the few OECD countries where the average life span has hardly increased since the early 1970s.

And that was in 2003. Things have gotten worse as even Krugman admits:

[I]t is worth noting that Denmark has had a fairly bad run since the global financial crisis, with a severe slump and a very weak recovery. In fact, real GDP per capita is about as far below pre-crisis levels as that of Portugal or Spain, although with much less suffering... just in case you wanted to think of Denmark as a role model across the board, this is a useful reminder.

So where does he get the absurd idea that "strong welfare states can work" and mention Denmark in the same breath?

 -RW

Bill Maher Tries to Trap Bernie Sanders

This is sad. Listen to the audience applaud as Bernie Sanders promotes one socialist program after another.

Bill Maher tries to counteract Sanders, but he has no skill in knowing how to advance free market ideas. He seems to have no idea that he can use arguments that show Sanders' programs will create great government-controlled central power operations that will lead to inefficiencies, distorted price production signals, wipeout incentives to advance health science and result in a government controlled system that is ripe for corruption.

Maher is correct that Sanders' proposals will be extremely expensive, but that is only the start of the problem.




-RW

Burn-the-Wealth Bernie and His Partial Enslavement System

By Ilana Mercer

“The top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent … as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,” roared the independent senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, at the first Democratic primary debate of 2015, in Las Vegas.

Standing for president, Sanders implies, somehow, that there exists in nature a delimited income pie from which a disproportionate amount of wealth is handed over to, or seized, by a class of evil doers: “the rich.”

Clueless Sanders omits the process by which that wealth magically materializes.

Wealth doesn’t exist pristine in nature, until individuals—deserving as much, if not more, of the pope’s love as the poor—apply their smarts, labor and savings to transform raw materials into marketable things that satisfy human desire and need.

But not if one listens to the socialist from Vermont as, sadly, too many Americans did.

You ask, why was it not just as discouraging when even more Americans tuned in to watch the first and second Republican Primary Debates, 24 and 23 million respectively?

For this reason:

Murray Sabrin on Bernie, Hillary and the Debate

A Letter to the Editor of the NorthJersey.com from Murray Sabrin:

Re "Clinton goes on the offensive," A-1, Oct.14.  The first debate of the five Democratic presidential candidates underscored their economic illiteracy and Mrs. Clinton's lust for power.  Senator Sanders stayed on his message of "income inequality," without explaining why the income gap in American has widened during the past four decades.

If the senator from Vermont had any knowledge of money and central banking, he would have taken the time to explain how the Federal Reserve is the "engine of inflation"--creating money out of thin air and thus boosting asset prices--stocks, real estate--and nominal incomes of upper income households, and redistributing income from the middle class to the financial elite.  Instead, the senator railed against casino capitalism, which is the result of the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy of the past seven years.

As far as Hillary Clinton is concerned, her remarks about being in the 1% (she and her husband have made tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees and other compensation since they both left the political arena over the past 15 years), was disingenuous at best.  Mrs. Clinton did not "work hard" for her success. She never invented anything, created a business or improved the well being of the American people with an innovation or her entrepreneurship skills.  Her financial "success" is solely due to her political celebrity and that she is a presidential candidate who could occupy the White House beginning in January 2017.  Mrs. Clinton's outrageous speaking fees are nothing more than the financial elites' payoff to have access to the Oval Office if she is the next president.

Help Bernie Sanders Learn Sound Economics From Walter Block

A group is trying to raise $3,096. to pay for Bernie Sanders to take an economics course with Walter Block at Loyola University New Orleans.

 -RW

Sanders, Clinton Clash on Capitalism at Democratic Debate Last Night

Prepare yourself from some serious capitalist hate in the video below.

Bernie Sanders makes no attempt to differentiate between crony capitalism and decent hardworking businessmen. Hillary Clinton actually does this for a minute in her response to Sanders, but then goes on to regurgitate the current absurd, but fashionable, anti-inequality view that is being pushed on the masses.





 -RW