WillFarnaby:
-Paul Krugman.
It sounds like he is objecting to the necessity of bubbles, not offering them as a solution.
adaher
April 2, 2014, 3:58pm
302
I remember that column and I remember also finding it a bit confusing. Which I’m sure is just so helpful to this discussion.
WillFarnaby:
Mr. Summers went on to draw a remarkable moral: We have, he suggested, an economy whose normal condition is one of inadequate demand—of at least mild depression—and which only gets anywhere close to full employment when it is being buoyed by bubbles.
-Paul Krugman.
This makes sense because why else would Krugman have famously called for a housing bubble?
Do you follow economics at all or do you just assume that since you are supposed to like Krugman he must not advocate things that are obviously bad to anyone with common sense.
Doesn’t sound like he’s calling for a bubble, only stating that the present company gets to full employment when buoyed by a bubble. I can state that New Orleans gets flooded streets only during hurricanes without advocating hurricanes.
According to this article , Ted Cruz has a much better chance than Rand Paul of getting TP support because Cruz is a warhawk while Paul (as a good libertarian) is an isolationist.
Which, if true, says a lot about the Tea Party in its current iteration.
But what’s that got to do with the Tea Party, you might ask? The movement is supposedly kaput, having retreated with its proverbial tail between its legs after Ted Cruz embarrassingly read “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor. And anyway, Liberty U is the Christian Right, not the Tea Party.
But that fundamentally misunderstands what the Tea Party actually is. It’s not a movement, it’s a brand. Or, more specifically, a re-brand that was formed in the wreckage of the Bush administration’s spectacular political flame-out when the True Believers badly needed to distance themselves from the GOP’s failure. It is simply the conservative movement in a tri-corner hat. And that movement, as Ronald Reagan described it, famously sits on a tri-legged stool of traditional values, strong defense and small government. How those issues are emphasized is a matter of the political zeitgeist of a given time.
Now, there would appear to be right there the seeds of a self-destructive internal contradiction, because if “small government” = “cheap government,” then “small government” and “strong defense” are obviously incompatible. The most egregious and expensive manifestation of American biggummint since WWII has been the MIC all along.
Which brings us to the until-recently-avoided third leg of the conservative stool: foreign policy. One gets the sense that enough time and distance from the Iraq debacle has finally passed that the hawks feel they can once more engage. And here is where the problem for Rand Paul really lies. He likes to portray himself as a man of principle in these matters, but his recent comments about the Ukraine and Russia crisis show how difficult it’s going to be to thread the needle as a presidential candidate. He sounds nearly incoherent as he tries to use the traditional GOP rhetoric of “strength” and “will” while staying true to his isolationist beliefs — and succeeds at neither.
As for his stand on civil liberties, it’s been noted that the Tea Party had a very recent miraculous awakening on this issue. If Rand Paul can turn a bunch of elderly white conservatives into permanent civil liberties activists, it really will be a miracle.
By contrast, Cruz has come out swinging. He’s taken a very hard line on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue that’s come up in recent months and seems to be making a play for hawk of the walk. Last week he was among the first to call Iran’s new Ambassador to the UN a “slap in the face” to America and use it to criticize President Obama for being “naive,” the right wing’s favorite descriptive term after “feckless” when talking about Democratic foreign policy.
But, it gets even worse for Paul:
And what about those billionaires? You’d think Rand Paul would at least have the backing of that constituency. After all, he promises to give them everything their little Randroid hearts desire. But they don’t like his foreign policy either and are promising to spend whatever it takes to stop him. In fact, the only real friends Paul has in the GOP are the measly 7 percent of young, white males who call themselves libertarians.
This is the opinion of the TP base WRT foreign policy, BTW – much nearer to Cruz’ than Paul’s, and differing from neocon orthodoxy only in its hostility to “military commitments overseas.”
