Joe Stiglitz in the NY Times:

A $1 Trillion Answer
By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
Published: November 29, 2008

WHAT President-elect Barack Obama will need to do is horribly complicated but also very clear.

First, he must stop the economy from going deeper into recession. Then he needs to bring about a robust recovery, preferably in ways that support the long-term needs of the United States: by repairing our neglected public works, invigorating our technological leadership, making our society greener, fixing our health care problems, healing our social and economic divide, and restoring our social compact. Read more…

Nice guys do finish first sometimes.

"Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday.

Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. ..."

On his blog, The Conscience of a Liberal , he says:

"A funny thing happened to me this morning …"

Pharmacy Information weblog

U.S., the Oxford style debate series sponsored by The Rosenkranz Foundation, announced the results of the first debate of its Fall 2008 season on the motion, “Universal health coverage should be the federal government’s responsibility.” A sold out audience at Rockefeller University’s Caspary Auditorium, New York City voted 58% for the motion and 34% against at the conclusion of the debate. 8% were undecided.

In his latest column Paul Krugman makes clear, once again, that he does not know the difference between health insurance and health care.

Once again, all together now, WE NEED HEALTHCARE, NOT HEALTH INSURANCE!

Krugman

There’s every reason to believe that a program that extends universal coverage to the nonelderly would soon become equally popular. Consider the case of Massachusetts, which passed a state-level plan for universal coverage two years ago. Read more…

Who's this Krugman guy? He's got a really good blog:

As we all know, the Bush administration essentially brushed aside all notion of due process. It locked up and tortured people it said were “enemy combatants”; it engaged in warrantless wiretapping; and so on.

We weren’t supposed to worry our pretty little heads about this, because we were supposed to take it as a given that these were people we could trust not to abuse their power.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department was interviewing job candidates, and asking,

What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

In other words, there was a combination of power without oversight and a deeply creepy cult of personality (which was obvious long before we got the latest specifics.)

I think we were lucky to get out of this with democracy more or less intact.

Let's not count our chickens, OK? Read more…

Krugman on Voodoo Health Economics:

Elizabeth Edwards has cancer. John McCain has had cancer in the past. Last weekend, Mrs. Edwards bluntly pointed out that neither of them would be able to get insurance under Mr. McCain’s health care plan.

It’s about time someone said that and, more generally, made the case that Mr. McCain’s approach to health care is based on voodoo economics: [the] foolish claim, refuted by all available evidence, that the magic of the marketplace can produce cheap health care for everyone.

McCain health plan — actually a set of bullet points on the campaign’s Web site — is entirely based on blind faith that competition among private insurers will solve all problems.

I’d like to single out one of these bullet points in particular — the first substantive proposal Mr. McCain offers (the preceding entries are nothing but feel-good boilerplate).

As I’ve mentioned in past columns, the Veterans Health Administration is one of the few clear American success stories in the struggle to contain health care costs. Since it was reformed during the Clinton years, the V.A. has used the fact that it’s an integrated system — a system that takes long-term responsibility for its clients’ health — to deliver an impressive combination of high-quality care and low costs. It has also taken the lead in the use of information technology, which has both saved money and reduced medical errors.

Sure enough, Mr. McCain wants to privatize and, in effect, dismantle the V.A. Naturally, this destructive agenda comes wrapped in the flag: “America’s veterans have fought for our freedom,” says the McCain Web site. “We should give them freedom to choose to carry their V.A. dollars to a provider that gives them the timely care at high quality and in the best location.”

That’s a recipe for having healthy veterans drop out of the system, undermining its integrated nature and draining away resources.

McCain sucks. So you'd think that any Democrat would be better on this issue than John Sidney. Sadly, no: Read more…

Krugman:

Mr. Obama, instead of emphasizing the harm done by the other party’s rule, likes to blame both sides for our sorry political state. And in his speeches he promises not a rejection of Republicanism but an era of postpartisan unity.

That — along with his adoption of conservative talking points on the crucial issue of health care — is why Mr. Obama’s rise has caused such division among progressive activists, the very people one might have expected to be unified and energized by the prospect of finally ending the long era of Republican political dominance.

Some progressives are appalled by the direction their party seems to have taken: they wanted another F.D.R., yet feel that they’re getting an oratorically upgraded version of Michael Bloomberg instead.

Paul, if you ever leave the House That Judith Unbuilt, you'd fit right in... as long as you can make these points while also working in phrases like "cumshot heard 'round the world" and "ram his compassionate conservatism further up the world’s ass."

Words matter, y'know.

Blessed are those who won't equivalate. Like Krugman:

Why, then, is there so much venom out there?

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.

Chris Matthews on OFS: Read more…

Here:

What progressives should be focused on now is taking on the political movement that brought Bush to power. In short, what we need right now isn't Bush bashing—what we need is partisanship.

Bingo!

I couldn't carry a tune if I had it in a sack, and I especially don't know the tune to Kumbaya.

More Krugman truth and goodness: Read more…

I mean, as oppposed to the insurance corps, who definitely deserve a seat at the table? Krugman:

Now Mr. Obama has lashed out at Mr. Edwards because two 527s — independent groups that are allowed to support candidates, but are legally forbidden from coordinating directly with their campaigns — are running ads on his rival’s behalf. They are, Mr. Obama says, representative of the kind of “special interests” that “have too much influence in Washington.”

The thing, though, is that both of these 527s represent union groups — in the case of the larger group, local branches of the S.E.I.U. who consider Mr. Edwards the strongest candidate on health reform. So Mr. Obama’s attack raises a couple of questions.

First, does it make sense, in the current political and economic environment, for Democrats to lump unions in with corporate groups as examples of the special interests we need to stand up to?

Second, is Mr. Obama saying that if nominated, he’d be willing to run without support from labor 527s, which might be crucial to the Democrats? If not, how does he avoid having his own current words used against him by the Republican nominee?

Bingo. Read more…

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyhow, Obama's trolls on TPM are spreading the rumor that Krugman's son works for Hillary.

Except, like all the trolls we're getting this primary season, they're too stupid to be believed, and so persistent they've just got to be paid. Read more…

Guess I'd better start hoarding food, then? Krugman:

It’s easy to get lost in the details of subprime mortgages, resets, collateralized debt obligations, and so on. But there are two important facts that may give you a sense of just how big the problem is.

First, we had an enormous housing bubble in the middle of this decade. To restore a historically normal ratio of housing prices to rents or incomes, average home prices would have to fall about 30 percent from their current levels.

Second, there was a tremendous amount of borrowing into the bubble, as new home buyers purchased houses with little or no money down, and as people who already owned houses refinanced their mortgages as a way of converting rising home prices into cash.

As home prices come back down to earth, many of these borrowers will find themselves with negative equity — owing more than their houses are worth. Negative equity, in turn, often leads to foreclosures and big losses for lenders.

And the numbers are huge. The financial blog Calculated Risk, using data from First American CoreLogic, estimates that if home prices fall 20 percent there will be 13.7 million homeowners with negative equity. If prices fall 30 percent, that number would rise to more than 20 million.

That translates into a lot of losses, and explains why liquidity has dried up. What’s going on in the markets isn’t an irrational panic. It’s a wholly rational panic, because there’s a lot of bad debt out there, and you don’t know how much of that bad debt is held by the guy who wants to borrow your money.

How will it all end? Markets won’t start functioning normally until investors are reasonably sure that they know where the bodies — I mean, the bad debts — are buried. And that probably won’t happen until house prices have finished falling and financial institutions have come clean about all their losses. All of this will probably take years.

Meanwhile, anyone who expects the Fed or anyone else to come up with a plan that makes this financial crisis just go away will be sorely disappointed.

Well, look. I'm sure the taxpayers will be glad to bail the banks out, right? Read more…

Heh.

Oh, come on, Paul. Say it. Read more…

Here:

To a remarkable extent, punditry has taken a pass on whether Gen. Petraeus’s picture of the situation in Iraq is accurate. Instead, it was all about the theatrics – about how impressive he looked, how well or poorly his Congressional inquisitors performed. And the judgment you got if you were watching most of the talking heads was that it was a big win for the administration – especially because the famous MoveOn ad was supposed to have created a scandal, and a problem for the Democrats.

Even if all this had been true, it wouldn’t have mattered much: if the truth is that Iraq is a mess, the public would find out soon enough, and the backlash would be all the greater because of the sense that we had been deceived yet again.

But here’s the thing: new polls by CBS and Gallup show that the Petraeus testimony had basically no effect on public opinion: Americans continue to hate the war, and want out. The whole story about how the hearing had changed everything was a pure figment of the inside-the-Beltway imagination.

What I found striking about the whole thing was the contempt the pundit consensus showed for the public – it was, more or less, “Oh, people just can’t resist a man in uniform.” But it turns out that they can; it’s the punditocracy that can’t.

Bingo. Read more…

Unbelievable? All too believable! Times:

I think Professor Krugman has completely lost his mind. His black and white view of American history - with all Republicans as evil and FDR as the Saviour - would put most Marxists to shame. Maybe he wants to get back at the world because hs is such a short man. He has become the modern version of Marat. Charlotte Corday where are you?

— Posted by Peter Schneider

(For those who came in late, Marat was a figure in the French Revolution, assassinated by Charlotte Corday.)

Oh, but MoveOn insulted General Betray-Us (not), and whenever they do that a kitten dies and we won't get our ponies! Read more…

Krugman's response-to-readers column, "The President Who Cried Peace," doesn't show up in Google, and I can't find it on the site, since it's disappeared behind the Times Select wall. However, this paragraph caught my eye:

Seth Feldman, Toronto: ...When Bush goes, Iraq implodes and the facts about the war and the rest of his administration start flooding out, you'd better start canceling vacations and learning how to do without sleep. The era of hidden history is coming to a very abrupt end.

Paul Krugman: One of my fears is that we won't actually get to see the hidden history. I guarantee you that there will be a chorus from the wise men of Washington urging the next president to let bygones be bygones. I hope he or she doesn't listen: we need some truth and reconciliation.

Vehement agreement. In fact, as we've said several times, we need a truth and reconciliation** Commission, so that there's some sort of institutional for the investigations. Read more…

We can't say "Constitutional crisis" often enough. Krugman always satisfies:

There’s something happening here, and what it is seems completely clear: the Bush administration is trying to protect itself by purging independent-minded prosecutors. Read more…

In the days after Bush stole the presidency in Florida 2000, Paul Krugman was, quite literally, the ONLY media figure to stand up and tell the truth about Bush, his administration, the Republican Party, and what was happening to our country. In the darkness and the horror and the helplessness, Krugman was one of the very few points of light and signs of hope.

I am so grateful to Paul Krugman. (Tears are literally coming to my eyes as I write this, and that doesn't happen very often to this case-hardened and deeply cynical old WASP.) I feel Paul's columns were the first pebbles in last Tuesday's avalanche.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have discovered Atrios, and from there, the blogosphere, in a Paul Krugman column about the Trent Lott takedown.

Here is something Krugman wrote back in 2003:

ON PARTISANSHIP  Read more…