KRUGMAN: "Yes, we are cheating our children, but the deficit has nothing to do with it."
Cheating Our Children
By PAUL KRUGMAN
So, about that fiscal crisis — the one that would, any day now, turn us into Greece. Greece, I tell you: Never mind.
Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It’s as if someone sent out a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness. Suddenly, the argument has changed: It’s not about the crisis next month; it’s about the long run, about not cheating our children. The deficit, we’re told, is really a moral issue.
There’s just one problem: The new argument is as bad as the old one. Yes, we are cheating our children, but the deficit has nothing to do with it.
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Fiscal policy is, indeed, a moral issue, and we should be ashamed of what we’re doing to the next generation’s economic prospects. But our sin involves investing too little, not borrowing too much — and the deficit scolds, for all their claims to have our children’s interests at heart, are actually the bad guys in this story.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/opinion/krugman-cheating-our-children.html?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto&_r=1&
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Employment to population ratio.
10% of people who were working in 1999 aren't working today. We're told that we're not working because we lack the education that the economy requires. That argument is bullshit, because if I get a whole shitload of education to get a job, I've simply displaced someone, perhaps onto unemployment (during which he'll be encouraged to buy enough education to displace me) or onto disability.
The problem is a stagnant economy. If debt were the problem, then interest rates wouldn't be zero. Investors wouldn't be paying the US government to hold their money.
Kitchen table public policy is killing us.
How's this for boiling it down; you can't solve tomorrow's hypothetical problem by ignoring today's actual problem.
