Oh, this is hilarious.
On Monday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe,” New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argued that “deficit things” aren’t something to be worried about, at least for the time being. But according to Steve Rattner, the Obama administration’s former “car czar,” Krugman’s analysis is the economic equivalent of climate change denial.
On Tuesday’s “Morning Joe,” Rattner reacted to Krugman’s remarks by making the analogy between climate change and the government’s long-term fiscal challenges, and suggested that both are problems requiring immediate attention.
“[T]o me, being a debt denier is the same thing as being a climate change denier,” Rattner said. “We’re putting millions of tons of carbon in our atmosphere every day that we are going to have to deal with, and we’re incurring billions of debt every day we have to deal with.
But which one actually affects people’s lives today? Or, should we just let the grandkids deal with it? Heh. h/t to Chris Horner.
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@MattS says: January 29, 2013 at 6:11 pm
Matt, I’m a big fan of Hazlett’s “Economics in One Lesson,” but I’m not prepared to make a categorical statement that “there is no evidence that this is ever not a net gain in practice.” That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but economics isn’t a hard science.
There are plenty of intelligent, educated people who believe free trade and globalism have destroyed the American middle class, and economics being what it is, I’ll wager you $1 we can find an economist who will say you’re wrong.
Gail Combs says:
January 30, 2013 at 1:40 am
You are naive as heck…
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I don’t know. Sometimes the inventor / entrepreneur catches the status quo napping. Review the history of Microsoft and the early MS-DOS days, if I’m remembering correctly IBM could have retained control easily if they were on the ball – they weren’t. They didn’t understand the potential of personal computers at all.
I’m not claiming you’re totally wrong or that what you’re talking about never happens. I’m not even going to claim that it doesn’t happen alot; I really don’t know. I will say I don’t think it’s safe to just assume that the entrenched / established corporate community is even approximately omnipotent or omniscient with respects to controlling innovation and new players on the market.
I worked at Chrysler during the summers to pay for school. The old guys on the line said that they had already made tires that never ran out for the life of the car, including police cars which are retrofitted for 500,000 miles use, and Chrysler had already made an engine that ran at 100 MPH, even with the heavy metal carcasses they were in. I worked there before 1983.
This work was done during WWII, but shelved for commercial reasons.
MattS says:
January 30, 2013 at 5:59 am
…. There are a lot of inventions out there that claim to do something like this. All have failed to produce the claimed results when independently tested.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Actually he worked for Ford and I think it was some sort of fuel injection they were working on but of course he could not say exactly what it was. We still used carburetors back then and gasoline fuel injection came out not long after. It may have been a combination of turbo plus fuel injection minus all the air quality stuff. All that EPA required junk on cars cuts down the fuel mileage. My 1976 Olds Cutlass 5 spd 8 cylinder with a carburetor got 26 MPG and my 1981 diesel pkup (VW) got 50 MPG after a caving buddy who was an airline mechanic finished messing with them.
After what Jim Jessup just did to my 1982 Pickup with a Cummins 12V Diesel, I am a lot more willing to believe the general run of the mill car on the road is an inefficient MESS. That old pickup is getting twice the fuel milage and she FLIES! She never had that much power before and she has over a 1/2 million miles on her.
Jim was on the design team for the engine and wrote the manual. Too bad no one at dodge or anywhere else ever uses it! We bought the Dodge factory service manual when we bought the truck. The factory manual is missing bunches of stuff about the proper way to tune that engine that is in the manual Jim Jessup wrote.
It has been forty years and if anything the fuel mileage on new cars is WORSE then I saw in the 1970s – 1980s
I presume you mean 100 MPG, but it’s still bull. If Chrysler put such an engine in their cars, it would give them a tremendous economic advantage over every other car manufacturer. The CEO and board of directors would endorse that in a minute, unless it was so expensive nobody could afford to buy it.
As for tires that last the lifetime of the car, the same thing. Chrysler wasn’t/isn’t in the tire manufacturing business. Any company that made such a tire would virtually corner the market.
So the old timers are full of bull. Always were, always will be.
Chris Mooney interviewing Paul krugman on “Point of Inquiry” — Krugnutter Gold:
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/paul_krugman_science_and_pseudoscience_in_economics/
policycritic says:
January 30, 2013 at 5:34 am
“Our monetary system since 1934 has operated domestically on fiat currency. It’s what permitted three government economists to determine in 1939 that we, as a country, could produce the armaments and materiel for WWII, and put everyone back to work (since we also had the physical resources).”
Well, that was independent of the currency as it was a wartime command economy. Besides, the US earned gold via lend&lease by selling weapons to UK and USSR.
“The oil crisis of 1973 and Volker’s mishandling of the Fed led to inflation, but were separate and apart from the 1971 currency adjustment. Inflation was alleviated when natural gas prices came down in 1978 and its use as energy ballooned.”
Volcker actually brought inflation under control by offering a higher interest rate than the inflation rate. That’s the normal way of bringing inflation under control; you reduce the money supply. Look it up, you got it the wrong way.
“Only the federal government has the power to be counter-cyclical in a downturn, as in our cold economy today. By this I mean, only the federal government, as the issuer of the currency, has the power to spend into the economy–with those pieces of green paper you mock–to provision itself and buy the goods and services that the private sector produces: research, infrastructure (a $2T to $4T need at the moment), education, communication, health care (not a handout to insurance companies), etc.”
Well, for instance priced climate research and invaluable wind turbines. Just two examples that show that the state can indeed spend all the money it prints, but you get no return in investment, making you poorer, not richer.
Do you expect your bureaucrats to spend money that they can generate in arbitrary quantity on something meaningful? Really? Do they do it right now? Oops, the US economy just contracts.
“Allow me to upset your day: the deficit is far too small. It needs to be a lot bigger to fix this economy right now.”
Hey, I’m German, you can decide to go to hell any way you like to, it’s amusing. We want our gold back, BTW, before you collapse.
“When the economy is at full employment and we have a smoking hot economy nearing inflation, then we can tax people and cut federal government spending to cool it down. Not now. The notion that we are leaving debt for our grandchildren is nonsense, and is obviated by the fact that we have a fiat currency.”
As exemplified by Robert Mugabe. I get your point. I think Mugabe is a big fan of Modern Monetary Theory like you. I hear Zimbabwe still has 217 USD in their treasury. That’s 16 trillion more than the US treasury has. Not that bad.
“We’re not paying off the debt for WWII, are we, because we denominate our debt, as a country, in our own currency.”
As I already said, the USSR and the UK paid their debt from WW II to the US. And after WW II the Dollar did NOT depreciate – it was still pegged to gold. Please check your facts.
@policycritic says:
January 30, 2013 at 6:06 am
I’d be really interested in learning how the US economy really works. Please tell us.
“I’d be really interested in learning how the US economy really works. Please tell us.”
Those who control the money-supply rule!
This power is so all-pervasive, that those wielding it, start to think they can control everything through their models, including the weather. And why not, they purchased the rest of reality with it. 😉
policycritic says:
January 30, 2013 at 7:47 am
I worked at Chrysler during the summers to pay for school. The old guys on the line said that they had already made tires that never ran out for the life of the car,
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Second time I have seen that assertion. As I am not a Physicist could someone please kindly explain how you can have an indestructable tyre and still have a vehicle that stops when you brake?
Be Kind … 🙂
I told my mechanic that Paul Krugman says that “Debt is something we owe ourselves”, but for some reason he still wants to be paid.
Leo Morgan says:
February 2, 2013 at 7:50 am
I told my mechanic that Paul Krugman says that “Debt is something we owe ourselves”, but for some reason he still wants to be paid.
+++++
Krugman considers “ourselves” to be other people. That the is the problem. I owe it to you to spend my money. There are all too many people who never pay a cent, but take.