Fund Your Utopia Without Me.™

04 March 2013

Paul Krugman: "I Just Blew It In My Debate With Joe Scarborough"







By Joe Weisenthal


Paul Krugman and Joe Scarborough went mano-a-mano in a taped debate with Charlie Rose earlier on deficits and spending.

As you should know by now, Krugman is arguing for aggressive spending, and a massive de-prioritization of the deficit as an economic concern.

Scarborough is the consummate grand bargaineer, and thinks it's important to do something fast on long-term entitlement spending.

The debate airs tonight, and our Brett Logiurato is covering it LIVE at 11 PM.

But it looks like Krugman whiffed.



"Well, we’ll see how it comes out after editing, but I feel that I just had my Denver debate moment: I was tired, cranky, and unready for the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff (In 1997 you said that the aging population was a big problem! When Social Security was founded life expectancy was only 62!) Oh, and I wasn’t prepared for Joe Scarborough’s slipperiness about what he actually advocates (he’s for more spending in the near term? Who knew?)."


We'll know more soon enough.

UPDATE: Via email, Krugman explains a little bit more about what happened:


"Don't know what will make it into the program. But it was many of the usual zombies -- the US could handle debt after WWII only because all our competitors were in ruins, the Social Security age 62 plus the irrelevant 15 to 1 ratio from 1950, and the risk of a bond attack from nowhere -- all the stuff I've dealt with repeatedly on the blog, but wasn't prepared to rebut effectively all over again. Oh, and Charlie raised the damned Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent."


SoRo:  Pass the popcorn!





http://tinyurl.com/c83p63e


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