 [Obama] probably shouldn't be calling for what I would want, because the public should want what I want, but it doesn't.
Paul Krugman
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/roundtable-part-ii-plan-jobs-14445346
What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending.
Paul Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/the-great-abdication/
"And when we’re experiencing depression economics ... this is a situation in which virtue becomes vice and prudence is folly; what we need above all is for someone to spend more, even if the spending isn’t particularly wise ... public spending on the scale needed never seems to happen ... and what actually ended up doing the trick [for ending the Great Depression] was spending that was beyond pointless, it was actually destructive – a sort of cruel joke on the part of the gods of economics. The point is that it would have been much better if the Depression had been ended with massive spending on useful things, on roads and railroads and schools and parks. But the political consensus for spending on a sufficient scale never materialized; we needed Hitler and Hirohito instead."
Paul Krugman
"Economics is Not a Morality Play" from the oxymoronically named column "The Conscience of a Liberal"
“What saved the economy and the New Deal [during the Great Depression] was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.”
Paul Krugman
"While Friedman’s theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there’s much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public."
Paul Krugman
Reason.com, article about Krugman, threaded comments starting at 11:51pm on 5.7.10
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