Krugman Interview

Calpundit interviewed Paul Krugman, who was on tour promoting his book over the weekend. The entire transcript is here; it appears they talked for quite a while. In case you were wondering but you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here’s the big question and answer:

KEVIN: If you were king of the economy, what’s the Krugman plan?

KRUGMAN: A phased elimination of all the Bush tax cuts, plus some additional taxes. I’d probably look first at some way to make the corporate profits tax actually effective again — the nominal rate is 35% but the effective rate is only 15% or so. Look at some cuts, maybe you start to talk about retirement age, and possibly some means testing of Medicare, and that’s enough to bring the budget under control. And meanwhile you have to manage the economy, you have to talk about what we can do to actually get demand going faster, and there are lots of things you can do….

Of course, for anything remotely like that to happen, Democrats would have to control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and even then the changes in the retirement age and means-testing for Medicare are unlikely. Krugman makes a good case that there a lot of things that can be worse than a top marginal tax rate over 33% and a tax on the countries wealthiest estates: inflation and high interest rates, for example.

AB

P.S. Some may also find this interesting:

I’m on the web, I read Josh Marshall regularly, and Atrios regularly, and I read you [CalPundit] occasionally, once every couple of days so I know what’s going on.

UPDATE: Link fixed.