Paul Krugman

[Auburn85 432]

Man, is this guy off the wall.

But heck, the whole op-ed for the NYT is off the wall

If you don't believe me, then look up some articles of his.

And those who know what I'm talking about, feel free to post some of his work

[Tiger Al 0]

Was this thread referring to any article in particular?

[Auburn85 432]

Not any in particular, but I guess we can discuss one of his more recent ones when he kinda mis- pharaphrased an article in Florida concerning Jeb trying to send state troopers to rescue Terri. As of right now it's an allegation, not a fact. And by the tone of his op -ed he seemed to be taking it as a fact

I for one will not vote for Jeb if he runs. And he'd be smart if he didn't.

We can discuss other articles too. Too many to think of right now, but I will post later.

[Piglet 0]

You know, unlike a lot of lefty writers I could name (*cough*Moore*cough*), Krugman, it seems to me, has a solid grasp of economics and makes sense more often than not. And many of his predictions have come true.

Doesn't mean he ain't wrong sometimes. I remember Jeb was quoted by the AP as "thinking about" the option to send the national guard in to rescue Terri. Which, in context, was probably a relatively harmless, noncomittal verbal sop to the extreme base, as well as a sign of how out of hand the whole Schiavo thing had come. If Krugman ran with that as if it was serious, he was using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.

[TexasTiger 12,997]

Not any in particular, but I guess we can discuss one of his more recent ones when he kinda  mis- pharaphrased an article in Florida concerning Jeb trying to send state troopers to rescue Terri. As of right now it's an allegation, not a fact. And by the tone of his op -ed he seemed to be taking it as a fact

I for one will not vote for Jeb if he runs. And he'd be smart if he didn't.

We can discuss other articles too. Too many to think of right now, but I will post later.

154697[/snapback]

Well, I read it from other sources, but for those who only believe Newsmax, et al, :

Report: Jeb Sent Agents to Rescue Terri

NewsMax.com Wires

Saturday, March 26, 2005

The Miami Herald reported Saturday that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush sent a team of state agents Thursday to rescue Terri Schiavo - but it was stopped short by local police.

"We were ready to go," Bush spokesman Jacob DiPietre told the Herald.

Doctors say that unless her feeding tube is reinserted, Schiavo, 41, will die a week or two after March 18. That is when a judge ordered it removed, having siding with Schiavo's huband's argument that Terri would have preferred it that way.

On Saturday, the Herald reported that local police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, were expecting "a showdown" between law enforcement agents.

But the squad from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Department of Children & Families charged with taking custody of Schiavo and reinserting her feeding tube backed down after police told agents of the FDLE that they would enforce state judicial rulings preventing any actions to save Terri Schiavo.

"We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in," a source with the local police told the Herald.

Apparently, the only showdown occured over the telephone.

"The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene," an unnamed official with the city police told the Herald. "When the sheriff's department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off."

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2...26/114904.shtml

If you want to attack Krugman, go ahead, but add some actual details.

[Piglet 0]

That wasn't Jeb. That was the Florida agency that deals with child welfare and abuse of the elderly, and that had been claiming jurisdiction over Terri on an abuse prevention theory. They were said to be surprised to find that the local cops actually intended to abide by the court order.

I'd be surprised if Jeb had actually sent them.

[TexasTiger 12,997]

That wasn't Jeb.  That was the Florida agency that deals with child welfare and abuse of the elderly, and that had been claiming jurisdiction over Terri on an abuse prevention theory.  They were said to be surprised to find that the local cops actually intended to abide by the court order.

I'd be surprised if Jeb had actually sent them.

154732[/snapback]

I'm not sure what you're saying. They are an executive agency and he heads the executive branch.

[Auburn85 432]

As the Bush administration tries to persuade America to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k), we can learn a lot from other countries that have already gone down that road.

Information about other countries' experience with privatization isn't hard to find. For example, the Century Foundation, at www.tcf.org, provides a wide range of links.

Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets:

Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies.

It leaves many retirees in poverty.

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

These fees cut sharply into the returns individuals can expect on their accounts. In Britain, which has had a privatized system since the days of Margaret Thatcher, alarm over the large fees charged by some investment companies eventually led government regulators to impose a "charge cap." Even so, fees continue to take a large bite out of British retirement savings.

A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry.

Advocates insist that a privatized U.S. system can keep expenses much lower. It's true that costs will be low if investments are restricted to low-overhead index funds - that is, if government officials, not individuals, make the investment decisions. But if that's how the system works, the suggestions that workers will have control over their own money - two years ago, Cato renamed its Project on Social Security Privatization by replacing "privatization" with "choice" - are false advertising.

And if there are rules restricting workers to low-expense investments, investment industry lobbyists will try to get those rules overturned.

For the record, I don't think giving financial corporations a huge windfall is the main motive for privatization; it's mostly an ideological thing. But that windfall is a major reason Wall Street wants privatization, and everyone else should be very suspicious.

Then there's the issue of poverty among the elderly.

Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that it has yet to deliver on its promise to reduce government spending. More than 20 years after the system was created, the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because, as a Federal Reserve study puts it, the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension." In other words, privatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them.

The same thing is happening in Britain. Its Pensions Commission warns that those who think Mrs. Thatcher's privatization solved the pension problem are living in a "fool's paradise." A lot of additional government spending will be required to avoid the return of widespread poverty among the elderly - a problem that Britain, like the U.S., thought it had solved.

Britain's experience is directly relevant to the Bush administration's plans. If current hints are an indication, the final plan will probably claim to save money in the future by reducing guaranteed Social Security benefits. These savings will be an illusion: 20 years from now, an American version of Britain's commission will warn that big additional government spending is needed to avert a looming surge in poverty among retirees.

So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty.

Originally published in The New York Times, 12.17.04

The SS system now is working? Modest reforms? Raise the retirement age? Raise the payroll taxes? Cut benefits? All 3?

If you don't want to privatize you r SS, then don't sign up for it. Only 4% would be privatized. Not 10, 20 30, 50%.

And I agree with Bush. What trust fund. If I paid into the system for over 40 years in a pay as you go system, what trust is that? In privatizing you will have at leat 4% there when you reite. SS , there is no security, unless you raise the retirement age, raise taxes, cut benefits. You can't do this everytime a problem comes up in SS. With the privatization, I'm not expecting a big financial gain. I just want something to be there. In SS there's no guarentee.

What SS? You can work from age 18-61 and pay into the SS and then die. You get nothing. 43 YEARS of profiting for the government, yet, the system is getting worse. Is SS going to help pay for your loved ones funeral no ? They don't even pay you enough to pay for the flowers($255) In Bush's plan , you can pass it down.

And if it's not that popular. The 4 trillion dollar figure is over bloated. If only 25% of the people want to do this. It shouldn't bankrupt the rest of the other 75%. To say that elderly is going to be out on the street is misleading.

[TexasTiger 12,997]

As the Bush administration tries to persuade America to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k), we can learn a lot from other countries that have already gone down that road.

Information about other countries' experience with privatization isn't hard to find. For example, the Century Foundation, at www.tcf.org, provides a wide range of links.

Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets:

Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies.

It leaves many retirees in poverty.

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

These fees cut sharply into the returns individuals can expect on their accounts. In Britain, which has had a privatized system since the days of Margaret Thatcher, alarm over the large fees charged by some investment companies eventually led government regulators to impose a "charge cap." Even so, fees continue to take a large bite out of British retirement savings.

A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry.

Advocates insist that a privatized U.S. system can keep expenses much lower. It's true that costs will be low if investments are restricted to low-overhead index funds - that is, if government officials, not individuals, make the investment decisions. But if that's how the system works, the suggestions that workers will have control over their own money - two years ago, Cato renamed its Project on Social Security Privatization by replacing "privatization" with "choice" - are false advertising.

And if there are rules restricting workers to low-expense investments, investment industry lobbyists will try to get those rules overturned.

For the record, I don't think giving financial corporations a huge windfall is the main motive for privatization; it's mostly an ideological thing. But that windfall is a major reason Wall Street wants privatization, and everyone else should be very suspicious.

Then there's the issue of poverty among the elderly.

Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that it has yet to deliver on its promise to reduce government spending. More than 20 years after the system was created, the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because, as a Federal Reserve study puts it, the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension." In other words, privatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them.

The same thing is happening in Britain. Its Pensions Commission warns that those who think Mrs. Thatcher's privatization solved the pension problem are living in a "fool's paradise." A lot of additional government spending will be required to avoid the return of widespread poverty among the elderly - a problem that Britain, like the U.S., thought it had solved.

Britain's experience is directly relevant to the Bush administration's plans. If current hints are an indication, the final plan will probably claim to save money in the future by reducing guaranteed Social Security benefits. These savings will be an illusion: 20 years from now, an American version of Britain's commission will warn that big additional government spending is needed to avert a looming surge in poverty among retirees.

So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty.

Originally published in The New York Times, 12.17.04

The SS system now is working? Modest reforms? Raise the retirement age? Raise the payroll taxes? Cut benefits? All 3?

If you don't want to privatize you r SS, then don't sign up for it. Only 4% would be privatized. Not 10, 20 30, 50%.

And I agree with Bush. What trust fund. If I paid into the system for over 40 years in a pay as you go system, what trust is that? In privatizing you will have at leat 4% there when you reite. SS , there is no security, unless you raise the retirement age, raise taxes, cut benefits. You can't do this everytime a problem comes up in SS. With the privatization, I'm not expecting a big financial gain. I just want something to be there. In SS there's no guarentee.

What SS? You can work from age 18-61 and pay into the SS and then die. You get nothing. 43 YEARS of profiting for the government, yet, the system is getting worse. Is SS going to help pay for your loved ones funeral no ? They don't even pay you enough to pay for the flowers($255) In Bush's plan , you can pass it down.

And if it's not that popular. The 4 trillion dollar figure is over bloated. If only 25% of the people want to do this. It shouldn't bankrupt the rest of the other 75%. To say that elderly is going to be out on the street is misleading.

154773[/snapback]

you will have at leat 4% there when you reite

Nothing in the market is guaranteed.

[Auburn85 432]

Texas Observer: The paperback version of your book ends with a quote from John Dean’s Worse Than Watergate: “I’ve been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy.”

Where are we right now?

Paul Krugman: We’re right on the edge between those two possibilities. Things have shifted quite a lot over the past few days. On the one hand, the ruling party really doesn’t believe in democratic norms. They’ve been trying to rig the election in a number of ways, and they’ve rolled out [the idea] that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for the terrorists, in effect. That’s a deeply undemocratic thing, and if they win, they will try to institutionalize that. On the other hand, if they lose and the records are opened—it’s pretty obvious that it will be devastating. So it’s a weird moment. You feel like people are noticing the nakedness of the emperor—finally—but either just at the last minute or maybe not quite in time.

What happened here after 9/11 was this adulation for the leadership that completely swamped any rational perception of who these guys were and what they were like. [The first presidential] debate had an effect partly because it was as if for the first time in three-plus years, people were able to see without the shroud of glory.

TO: But does the Democratic Party finally get it?

PK: Howard Dean gets it, and it’s been interesting to watch him. Having lost the nomination he’s been transformed bit by bit from an iconoclast that the party wants to distance itself from, to an effective spokesman for the Kerry campaign. But I still think there are a lot of people who don’t want to face up to it.

People have no idea just how rich the rich have gotten. They’re more likely to get agitated over the idea that some congressman is getting a few-thousand-dollar junket, and it doesn’t register with them that some plutocrat is getting a vastly larger tax break that is going to crimp the ability to provide [government] programs.

The Congressional Budget Office has basically validated everything that critics have said about Bush’s tax policies. Sure enough, the tax cuts are bigger as a percentage of income the further up the scale you go. And if you put that together with the CBO’s estimates of incomes, you find out that a third of the tax cuts went to the top one percent of families. That will grow over time because the estate tax repeal hasn’t fully kicked in yet. The top one percent of families got more tax cuts than the bottom 80 percent of families. We know from other estimates that people earning more than a million a year received more in tax cuts than the bottom 60 percent of families. It really is very heavily elitist, very tilted.

TO: One of the things we learned from the first debate—according to the president—is that the Taliban is no longer in existence.

PK: Afghanistan is really a shameful thing. I was in favor of our going in there: Al Qaeda is based in Afghanistan, the Taliban is sheltering them, they attack us, we go in.… The International Security Force wanted to extend their operations beyond Kabul, and they were willing to put in more soldiers. And the United States basically said, “No, we want to do our search and destroy operations outside Kabul. We don’t want you guys to spread out.” But we didn’t put in enough soldiers to secure the country. And so the warlords are back, and the Tailban is back.

This business about the Taliban not being in existence—it’s one of those things where you’re wondering what is happening: Was he just being casual, and what he meant to say is that we overthrew them, or does he really not know?

In the first debate, Bush said that when Kerry voted to authorize force [in Iraq] he saw the same intelligence Bush did—which may not be a lie. What we know is that important intelligence was withheld from the Senate. They were never told that most of the aluminum tube story was garbage. They were never told that the Niger uranium purchase story was garbage. So, important intelligence was withheld. But we don’t know whether Bush ever knew any of that, or looked at it…. I’ve heard that Bush didn’t know just a few months before the Iraq war that there was a difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

What’s interesting and sad is how predictable so many things were. This whole arc has a nightmare feel to it: You see it all happening, you see how it’s going to happen, and not enough people will believe you. And then it just keeps going along. If people would step back and think to themselves, “What happened to America, the great superpower, over these last three years?”, they would be wondering why we can’t get rid of Bush, why we have to wait another couple months. They managed to get us trapped in this completely hopeless situation, for which there’s no outcome that in some sense won’t look like a big defeat for the United States. The only question is, how big? And a bunch of people will have died for a mistake.

TO: The day after the election, what’s the column if Kerry wins?

PK: Do not be magnanimous in victory. I hope the people around him understand that this is not politics as we know it. It’s not, “OK, well, we won an election. After the election we’ll get together and work in a bipartisan way to help the country.” They didn’t work in a bipartisan way when the United States was attacked. They immediately saw it as a way to achieve political dominance. Kerry has got to understand that he has a window of opportunity to expose what’s going on and to rock these people back to the point where we can try to reclaim the normal workings of democracy. Unless there’s a true miracle and the Democrats take the House—which is extremely unlikely—it’s going to be very bitter political civil war from Day One. The House leadership will try to undermine Kerry. I’m sure they’ll try to impeach him almost immediately. On anything.

We can go on and on about Tom DeLay, but the point is Tom DeLay is not an aberrant thing. He’s not an accident. The whole thrust of where we’ve been going for a couple of decades in this country has been towards putting someone like Tom DeLay in a position of great power. So, my column to Kerry, my open letter to him if he wins, will be: Do not be magnanimous. You need to expose and dismantle this machine.

TO: Assuming they don’t shred everything beforehand.

PK: They can’t shred the people. The biggest thing would be to end the reign of terror in the agencies, so that the CIA and the Treasury Department—the civil servants—can talk about what actually happened. It’s obvious that there was intense pressure placed upon the agencies to come up with the conclusion that [the Administration] wanted. But very few people are willing to say that, because these guys play rough. There’s a lot of funny stuff involving the Justice Department, where officials who’ve criticized Ashcroft’s handling of stuff—which is disastrous, right? Not a single successful terror prosecution [but] a lot of grandstanding—have found themselves subject to internal investigations. If we can get to a point where these people can speak freely, it will matter a lot. Homeland Security: I want people to be able to talk freely about the timing of terror alerts. You can draw a chart and it’s obvious that terror alerts increase when Bush is down in the polls and vanish when he’s up in the polls. But we need someone to go on the record and say that they’ve been used as a political tool.

TO: In writing about the cult of personality surrounding the president, you mention the 27 photographs of him that appear in the 2005 Budget.

PK: I actually went to check and looked at a budget from the Clinton years. It’s a rather dry-looking thing with charts and tables. The Bush budget is very much short on charts and tables–it’s better not to think about what would be in them. But it has these themes, uplifting themes of various kinds and each of them is illustrated with multiple glossy color photos of Bush doing presidential-type things. Obviously you see him standing in front of a giant American flag talking about homeland security, but you also see him hiking along a mountain trail, comforting the elderly, helping children learn how to read. It really does look like something from a Communist country. You know, I joked when I wrote about it that they forgot the photo of him swimming the Yangtze River. It’s very un-American, but it fits in with Operation Flight Suit—that kind of stagecraft, that glorification of the individual leader. What I wrote at the time of the carrier landing is that in the American tradition, the president is a civilian—even if he’s a former general. The president does not appear in uniform; he’s not a generalísimo; he’s not a hero. That’s why the Constitution says the president is the commander-in-chief: to make it very clear that civilian authority, not military, runs the country. And then here we are doing these things that are really something that you would expect to see in a banana republic.

TO: What’s the column if Bush wins?

PK: I don’t really want to think about that. The problem is there are different ways he could win, too.

TO: Jimmy Carter has already written an op-ed in The Washington Post saying that the basic international conditions for a fair election are not there in Florida.

PK: We’re within inches of having most of the world, actually all of the world, and quite a few Americans, believing that we’re no longer a functioning democracy. That could happen a month from now. Moderates and liberals made a terrible mistake in 2000. Their attitude was well, this was very bad, but the right thing to do was to basically gloss over it and pretend it’s okay. That just encouraged these guys. It should have been a mobilizing point. Instead, everything we really know about the voting looks worse this year…. Sometimes it’s a little soothing to read history. I have developed a big taste for the novels of Alan Furst, who writes these historical thrillers set in the thirties and forties in Europe. I think the very darkness of it—the fact that we know that it all came out okay, makes you sort of feel better. The other book I read in the last couple of weeks was Rubicon, a new, rather well-written story about the fall of the Roman republic. You find yourself doing that sort of thing. Me and Robert Byrd.

Copyright © 2001 Texas Democracy Foundation. All rights reserved.

Trying to rig the election?

And about SS, you don't have to invest in the Stock Market. Some Bonds are virtually risk free.

[Auburn85 432]

What's Going On?

by Paul Krugman

The New York Times

March 29, 2005

Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself.

We can see this failing clearly in other countries. In the Netherlands, for example, a culture of tolerance led the nation to ignore the growing influence of Islamic extremists until they turned murderous.

But it's also true of the United States, where dangerous extremists belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence.

Before he saw the polls, Tom DeLay declared that "one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." Now he and his party, shocked by the public's negative reaction to their meddling, want to move on. But we shouldn't let them. The Schiavo case is, indeed, a chance to highlight what's going on in America.

One thing that's going on is a climate of fear for those who try to enforce laws that religious extremists oppose. Randall Terry, a spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents, hasn't killed anyone, but one of his former close associates in the anti-abortion movement is serving time for murdering a doctor. George Greer, the judge in the Schiavo case, needs armed bodyguards.

Another thing that's going on is the rise of politicians willing to violate the spirit of the law, if not yet the letter, to cater to the religious right.

Everyone knows about the attempt to circumvent the courts through "Terri's law." But there has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice - a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge's order that she remain there.

And the future seems all too likely to bring more intimidation in the name of God and more political intervention that undermines the rule of law.

The religious right is already having a big impact on education: 31 percent of teachers surveyed by the National Science Teachers Association feel pressured to present creationism-related material in the classroom.

But medical care is the cutting edge of extremism.

Yesterday The Washington Post reported on the growing number of pharmacists who, on religious grounds, refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control or morning-after pills. These pharmacists talk of personal belief; but the effect is to undermine laws that make these drugs available. And let me make a prediction: soon, wherever the religious right is strong, many pharmacists will be pressured into denying women legal drugs.

And it won't stop there. There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient. Again, think of how such laws expose doctors to pressure and intimidation.

But the big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster, so that the courts can be packed with judges less committed to upholding the law than Mr. Greer.

We can't count on restraint from people like Mr. DeLay, who believes that he's on a mission to bring a "biblical worldview" to American politics, and that God brought him a brain-damaged patient to help him with that mission.

What we need - and we aren't seeing - is a firm stand by moderates against religious extremism. Some people ask, with justification, Where are the Democrats? But an even better question is, Where are the doctors fiercely defending their professional integrity? I think the American Medical Association disapproves of politicians who second-guess medical diagnoses based on video images - but the association's statement on the Schiavo case is so timid that it's hard to be sure.

The closest parallel I can think of to current American politics is Israel. There was a time, not that long ago, when moderate Israelis downplayed the rise of religious extremists. But no more: extremists have already killed one prime minister, and everyone realizes that Ariel Sharon is at risk.

America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

Topplebush.com

Posted: March 31, 2005

Did he forget to mention the 57 democrats that voted in an attempt to keep her alive? What about the Reps. that voted against it? What about the r's and d's that didn't vote on it at all?

And Jeb sending to save Schiavo is an allegation, not a fact.