Paul Krugman Gets Berned. Er, Burned.
In a speech to a Morgan Stanley group on April 18, 2013, WikiHillary praised the SimpsonBowles deficit reduction plan, which included reforming the tax code to increase investment and entrepreneurship and raising certain taxes and trimming some spending and entitlements to make them more sustainable.
The ultimate shape of that grand bargain could take many forms, she said, but Hillary stressed behind closed doors: “Simpson-Bowles … put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate revenues and we have to incentivize growth. It’s a three-part formula.”
She is right. We’ll never get out of this economic rut, and protect future generations, unless the business and social sectors, Democrats and Republicans, all give and get something — and that’s exactly where WikiHillary was coming from.
— WikiHillary for President, Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, today
Eeewwwwwe. I mean, um … yikes.
Friedman, of course, has spent the last decade or more obsessively pushing a “Grand Bargain.” He says in today’s column that he wishes Clinton had campaigned on this. In order to build an electoral mandate for it, see.
Seriously; he says this.
Paul Krugman, by contrast, has spent the eight years or so trashing deficit mania, and the last five years mocking Simpson-Bowles. And Simpson and Bowles. And their ilk. Including Thomas Friedman.
Also in Friedman’s column today:
In an October 2013 speech for Goldman Sachs, Clinton seemed to suggest the need to review the regulations imposed on banks by the DoddFrank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed in 2010. Her idea was not to get rid of all of the rules but rather to make sure they were not imposing needless burdens that limited lending to small businesses and startups.
As Clinton put it, “More thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don’t kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here.” Again, exactly right.
Friedman thinks this, too, would have been a hit with the public if only Clinton had had the guts to campaign on it.
Krugman in his Twitter feed has been pushing the proposition that Clinton really, honestly, dammit, was the strongest possible Democratic nominee to beat Trump, cuz she so deftly baited him during the first debate into his weeklong meltdown about that former Miss Universe, and no other candidate would have thought to do that. Then again, there are a few possible candidates whose victory would have been assured without that. But, whatever. Candidates who speak like this, for example.*
And he responded to some pundits’ dismay at the tail-wagging-the-dog role that Clinton’s campaign consultants and friends—as Frank Bruni put it recently, the extensive array of Clinton whisperers—who crafted everything from minutia to the very raison d’être for her candidacy, by insisting that that’s what consultants do. Making me wonder why we don’t just cut to the chase and cut out the puppet, and nominate a consultant instead.
None of this matters now, of course. I’ll reiterate, yet again, that I believe that Clinton is a genuinely different candidate, politician, and in important respects, person now than she was until recently. And I support her wholeheartedly now. But even if she were who she was in 2013 I’d be supporting her, if grudgingly.
But the instant I read that Friedman column—particularly the part about Clinton telling Morgan Stanley she supports Simpson-Bowles—I thought of Krugman. And wondered whether upon reading that, if he did, he was moving close enough to the bonfire to feel a tad Berned.
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*The link, inadvertently omitted originally, is to an op-ed by Elizabeth Warren in yesterday’s Washington Post titled “Elizabeth Warren: Trump didn’t invent the ‘rigged election’ myth. Republicans did.” The second Friedman excerpt also was not indented here originally. All is now corrected. 10/20 at 2:12 p.m.
Bev, there is not link for this: Candidates who speak like this, for example.
Not sure what you mean, Dan.
If you fill in enough of the blanks (like Friedman and Bev) formed by only using parts of a speech you can make it sound anyway you want.
Why anyone would want to do such a thing is the question.
Well, Clinton can release other parts or the whole transcript if she wishes, now that this part is out. But she either supported Simpson-Bowles or she didn’t. She apparently said in that speech that she did.
No, you have no idea whether she did or not. No one does.
I have seen nothing in her political life that suggests such a thing, from the Senate through two campaigns and now a DP platform she supports.
The sentence: Candidates who speak like this, for example.
Suggesting there was to be a link for the word “this”. I thus ask myself: Candidates who speak like what?
Oh, gosh, Dan. Thanks. Yeah, I meant to link to Elizabeth Warren’s op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post. I’ll add the link now.
Just inserted the link.
well, anyone who supports simpson bowles needs their head examined.
i think the idea stems from two fallacies, one is simply a Big Lie, and the other is conventional wisdom
the Big Lie is that Social Security is “welfare.” But they have been talking that way in government circles since at least Carter. Before that it was only “the few and the stupid” who talked that way.
the conventional wisdom is that we have to do anything to promote growth without regard to the secondary (hah! primary!) effects of that anything.
i have not seen any evidence whatsoever that politicians can actually think. but it is a shame that “economists” let them get away with this.
or is it once again “the church” (the economists) working hand in hand with “the king” (the corporations) to keep the people fooled?