Paul Krugman sinks to a new low with this passage:

In America, many self-described deficit hawks are hypocrites, pure and simple. They’re eager to slash benefits for those in need but their concerns about red ink vanish when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy. Thus, Senator Ben Nelson, who sanctimoniously declared that we can’t afford $77 billion in aid to the unemployed, was instrumental in passing the first Bush tax cut, which cost a cool $1.3 trillion.

Where to begin?

First, no economist—let me repeat that—NO economist, not even Paul Krugman on the days when he’s being an economist—would count a tax cut as a cost for purposes of policy analysis. A cost is something that consumes resources, not something that changes the ownership of resources. My Principles of Economics students all understand this; so, presumably, does the Nobel-prize winning author of a prominent Principles textbook. (A possible exception: You could call a present-day tax cut costly if it necessitates a future tax increase which, for some reason, is costlier to collect than the present-day tax. I guarantee you this is not what Krugman has in mind. If it were,the $1.3 trillion number that he highlights would be totally irrelevant to the actual cost.)

Next, unemployment benefits are costly, both insofar as they discourage recipients from seeking work and insofar as they necessitate taxes that discourage productive activity. The cost of $77 billion worth of benefits is not $77 billion, but it’s not zero either.

So unemployment benefits are costly and tax cuts are not. Which doesn’t mean that all unemployment benefits are bad or that all tax cuts are good, but it’s plenty adequate to absolve the hypocrisy charge.

But Krugman, as is his wont lately, appears committed to the following flat-out dishonest rhetorical agenda:

Continue reading ‘There He Goes Again’

In a blog post on what he calls the “Bad Logic of Fiscal Austerity”, Paul Krugman lays the following calculation before the public:

Let me start with the budget arithmetic, borrowing an approach from Brad DeLong. Consider the long-run budget implications for the United States of spending $1 trillion on stimulus at a time when the economy is suffering from severe unemployment.

That sounds like a lot of money. But the US Treasury can currently issue long-term inflation-protected securities at an interest rate of 1.75%. So the long-term cost of servicing an extra trillion dollars of borrowing is $17.5 billion, or around 0.13 percent of GDP.

Yes. That’s the long-term cost of borrowing an extra trillion dollars. (Actually, the cost is even lower than Krugman says it is.) But the long term cost of spending an extra trillion dollars is somewhere in the vicinity, of, oh, about a trillion dollars, or about 7.4% of GDP.

Now you might argue that if some of that spending puts unemployed resources to work, then the true cost of spending a trillion is somewhat less than a trillion, but Krugman, at least here, does not attempt to make that argument. Nor do I expect that even Paul Krugman would dare to argue that an adjustment for unemployed resources could reduce the cost of government spending by roughly 98%.

Krugman is right when he says that borrowing is cheap. But the issue isn’t borrowing; it’s spending—and spending is expensive. It appears that like the President, Krugman wants to divert your attention from spending to borrowing so he can dismiss legitimate concerns without even acknowledging them. It’s a cheap trick. Don’t let either of them get away with it.

Edited to add: In fairness to Krugman, he appears to be imagining that the trillion is never paid back, so that the cost of spending it is simply the debt service of 17.5 billion per year forever. But his column makes it sound like the cost is a single one-time payment of 17.5 billion, which is absurd.