Paul Krugman Steps on Marco Rubio’s Parade. And Kills My Entertainment.
Damn. Now Marco Rubio will have to scratch that line from his response to the State of the Union address tonight. Depriving those of us who enjoy political comedy of the fun of watching Rubio explain this fact during the next couple of days, after the CEO of Chrysler Corp. makes a public statement that federal spending has risen 12.7 percent, not 37 percent, since the fourth quarter of 2008. And that Chrysler has absolutely no plans whatsoever to close the Ohio Jeep plant that it just spent more than $1 million expanding in order to hire 1,200 new workers, and ship those jobs to China.
You shouldn’t have let that cat out of the bag today, Prof. Krugman!
Sheeesh. You’d almost think the Republicans hired me as their statistician/mathematician. Hmm. Maybe I’ll apply to Fox News for consulting work. My math abilities are every bit as good as those of the person who did the math on that statistic. Trust me.
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Okay, okay. I don’t actually know that Rubio planned to include this hot statistic in his response tonight. It’s just my speculation.
Note that Krugman is making the Best Possible Case for the “spending under Obama” meme, since the first two quarters of 2009 are part of GWB’s final budget, and BarryO’s minuscule spending really only begins in July of 2009.
Good point, Ken.
I thought the federal fiscal year was October 1 to September 30. So why July?