Krugman: It is Always Good

Here is an interview of Paul Krugman by Keith Olbermann. First they joke about the fact that Newt Gingrich thinks Obama takes his marching orders from Krugman. The fact that Obama has refused all of Krugman's advice and done the opposite of what Krugman has pleaded for him to do, that reality has dinged with Gingrich. Republicans carry a "truth shield" that effectively keeps them shielded from the truth.

The really fun bit is around 3:05 into the video where Krugman points out that Obama has painted himself into a corner with his "it is always good" approach to the economic situation in the US.



Notice that at 4:10 Krugman notes that Barak Obama is giving Herbert Hoover 1932 speeches with the same calls for austerity. Krugman correctly points out that Obama is not Hoover, but he is a lot like FDR in 1937. From Wikipedia:

The Recession of 1937–1938 was a temporary reversal of the pre-war 1933 to 1941 economic recovery from the Great Depression in the United States. Economists disagree about the causes of this downturn, but agree that government austerity reversed the recovery from the 1929 Crash. Keynesian economists tend to assign blame to cuts in federal spending and increases in taxes at the insistence of the US Treasury, while monetarists, most notably Milton Friedman tended to assign blame to the Federal Reserve's tightening of the money supply in 1936 and 1937.