Oh? What about shoebomber Richard Reid? What about Taliban solider John Walker Lindh? What about Yahya Goba, Shafal Mosed, Yasein Taher, Taysal Galab, Mukhtar al-Bakri and Sahim Alwan of Lackawanna, New York? What about Jeffrey Battle, Patrice Ford, Ahmed Bilal, Muhammad Bilal, and October Lewis of Portland, Oregon? And Mike Hawash? How about Masoud Ahmad Khan, Seifullah Chapman, Yong Ki Kwon, Donald Surratt, and Hammad Abdur-Raheem from the Washington DC area? What about James Ujaama? And Iyman Faris?

No doubt Paul Krugman would also well note how FDR lied during his 1940 election campaign:

"And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

...while figuring at that very moment ever possible way to get us into one without getting impeached.

And for the record, the Democratic party platform in 1932 was to balance the budget by cutting waste from government.

And here's a good comment from a reader, keying off Krugman's crackpot theory that all it takes for there to be an economic boom is a depression just before it:

You see, just about anyone could have brought the economy back to prosperity; the worse shape we're in, the easier it is to do. I guess this moves FDR's success down a few notches, since his starting point was so low. Which started me wondering: what would Krugman's obituary of FDR look like?

To begin, we would be told that wiser heads need to explain the truth to us common folk, before we're bullied into believing the myths. We would learn of the controversial nature of FDR's restructure of the federal government, his battles with Congress, the numerous programs ultimately shot down by the Supreme Court, and an unemployment rate that remained over 20% even after eight years in office. There would be his poorly conceived, underfunded, and misrepresented Social Security plan (it's not a retirement fund - FDR lied!) that would someday bankrupt our grandchildren. More significantly, there would be no mention of his oratory skills, his brilliant use of the media, his ability to inspire hope and real optimism across America. And there would be no mention of his firm moral stand, and ultimate victory, over the greatest force of evil in the world, preserving the freedom of millions in America and Europe.

And the next week, Krugman could take on Truman as the bumbling heir to the FDR legacy, as George W. is to Reagan: "He was poor student, who couldn't even run the family business profitably, now by luck inheriting a job he isn't qualified for, trying to continue the same failed policies..."

Because that's what all this is about, isn't it?

If Okrent's insistence on violating the anonymity of sources that supposedly "lied" (as opposed to being mistaken or incorrect) gets people to stop talking to the media, then why isn't this a good thing? It will teach people to regard reporters as the enemies they really are and reduce the credibility of the media as an "objective" source.

Anything the media writes from an anonymous source will simply be twisted to reflect the dominant political preferences of the liberal reporter anyway. Furthermore, we can't even be certain if these anonymous sources even exist. Making up stories and then attributing them to phantom sources whose veracity never needs to be proven is far easier than actually hunting down and questioning these sources. Witness Jayson Blair.

It sounds like Okrent is trying to institute a policy that will shoot the New York Times in the foot. More power to him.

Mark Pokorni

In his Friday New York Times column -- the second of two Krugman attacks on Reagan last week -- the best Krugman can do is desperately speak of the "secret" of the Reagan boom. He admonishes us that Reagan's achievement was not "magical." And he contrasts it with the "miracle" that occurred under Bill Clinton. Unusual language for a scientist often said to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize in economics. But then again, let's not be too surprised. As new ex officio Krugman Truth Squad member Joe Veranth pointed out to me in an email, Krugman once wrote "my economic theories have no doubt been influenced by my relationship with my cats."

If there is any theory at all put forward in Krugman's column, it is that poverty creates wealth. You see, according to Krugman, Reagan was simply lucky to have become president when "the U.S. economy was deeply depressed, with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. So there was plenty of room to grow..."

So Reagan deserves no credit for the courage, insight and political skill to do the right things to pull America out of a deadly tailspin. The tailspin itself deserves all the credit. Human action counts for nothing. Presidents are but twigs floating on the tides of economic fate.

Unfortunately for Krugman, this mystical interpretation of economic history has several inconvenient corollaries. We'd have to use it to similarly discredit the economic achievement of Krugman's idols Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes -- after all, in the Great Depression there was "plenty of room to grow." And, of course, we'd have to let Krugman's bête noir George W. Bush off the hook for the recession and jobless recovery that Krugman is always ranting about. After the Clinton "miracle" there just wasn't "plenty of room to grow."

At least one benefit of Krugman's fatalism is that it should make the economy as easy to predict as when the moon is in the second house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars. Indeed, in Friday's column Krugman claims a victory for his favorite flavor of economic astrology. He writes, "... it all played out just as 'left-wing Keynesian economics' predicted."

To anyone who knows even the slightest thing about the history of economics, this statement is a laughable lie. The truth is that the "stagflation" of the 1970s -- the combination of high inflation and low economic growth -- utterly confounded the Keynesian orthodoxy, which would have predicted that such a combination was impossible. Then in the 1980s, the Keynesian model predicted that the combination of falling interest rates and Reagan's tax cuts should have created a massive stimulus to aggregate demand that would send inflation even higher than it already was -- yet inflation fell dramatically over the 1980s and 1990s.

Honorary Krugman Truth Squad member Caroline Baum pointed me to a classic smoking-gun memo that tells us exactly what Krugman's "'left-wing Keynesian economics' predicted."  In November 1982, when Krugman was a staff economist in Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, he co-authored with Larry Summers (later to be Clinton's Treasury secretary) a memo warning of a coming "inflation time bomb." Krugman and Summers wrote, "It is reasonable to expect a significant reacceleration of inflation in the near future... A significant portion of the slowing of consumer price inflation since 1980 does not represent a reduction in the underlying rate."

At that point inflation had fallen from a maximum of 14.6% in March 1980 to 4.5%. Its average for the rest of Reagan's presidency was 3.5%. The "inflation time bomb" Krugman predicted didn't go off. It still hasn't.

But with less-than-stellar predictions like that based on "left-wing Keynesian economics," Krugman didn't last long at the Counsel of Economic Advisors. Did he fall, or was he pushed? All we know is that he has written of his time in Washington that "many powerful people prefer to take advice from those who make them feel comfortable rather than from those who will force them to think hard. ...so I was not tempted to stay on in Washington."

In Friday's column Krugman not only lies about his own incorrect predictions -- he lies about his ideological opponent's entirely correct ones. He says that Reagan's "supply-side advisers...promised, but failed to deliver, a sustained acceleration in economic growth."

Let's just look at the record. Using official National Bureau of Economic Research business cycle dates (and not making up our own to flatter our case like Krugman does), the Reagan boom that began in November 1982 lasted 92 months -- making it the second longest expansion on record. But it didn't stop there. After pausing for a brief recession of eight months, the economy took off again on an expansion that ended up lasting 120 months -- an all-time record.

One way to see it is that Reagan set in motion a period of prosperity that lasted 220 months with only an eight-month break in the middle. Or you could even say it's still going on. After another eight-month hiatus, the boom is back on -- inspired by the same combination of falling inflation and tax-cutting that marked the Reagan years (and that still utterly befuddles the precepts and predictions of "left-wing Keynesian economics").

But in Friday's column, Krugman specifically dismisses the idea that Reagan's economic policies could have possibly contributed anything to the "Clinton-era miracle." He didn't say whether or not they contributed to the present Bush boom --  because that's a subject that Krugman doesn't like to draw attention to (although he admitted en passant in an article last week in the New York Times Magazine that "the recovery has finally started to look like the real thing").

Considering that Krugman can only conceive of the prosperity during the Clinton administration as a causeless "miracle" -- he even admitted in a television interview earlier this year that it occurred "for reasons we're not clear about" -- it seems illogical to be so sure that Reagan had nothing to do with it. A more scientific approach would be to quote Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, who said, "If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

I'm certain Ronald Reagan would have had no hesitancy to admit that the era of tax-cutting began not with him, but with the 1964 "Kennedy tax cuts" that reduced the top individual income tax from 91% to 70% -- and accelerated a boom that lasted even longer than the one ignited by Reagan's tax cuts. So why would an honest liberal be hesitant to admit that Clinton not only built his period of prosperity on the foundation that Kennedy and Reagan had laid, but indeed borrowed their methods when it suited him? Yes, Clinton raised income taxes in 1993. But he cut taxes with the Tax Relief Act of 1997, including a sharp cut in the capital gains tax. In his Friday column Krugman notes that Clinton's "miracle" didn't happen "until Bill Clinton's second term" -- yet he misses the obvious connection.

So now, with Reagan's accomplishments now more widely honored than ever, Bush's economy booming, and Bush himself rising in the polls, we see Krugman revealed for what he really is. A frightened savage unable to explain the phenomena in the world around him except as "magic" and "miracle" -- now stripped even of his usual pretense of economic pseudo-science. This passage from a classic volume on the role of magic in primitive cultures explains it:

The reason for this seems to lie in the ignorance and in the intensely powerful imagination of the savage, which make him unable to distinguish truth from error. ...Furthermore, the imaginings of the savage are heightened by his precarious life and by the intensity of the dangers which beset him in his struggle to survive.

Like yesterday's savages, today's liberals.

Correction 6/15/2004... Due to a typographical error, I had written "inflation fell dramatically over the 1990s" It was originally intended to be the 1980s, but I have corrected to read "the 1980s and 1990s" which makes my original point best of all.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:44 AM | link  

Sunday, June 13, 2004