-By Warner Todd Huston
CNNs Fareed Zakaria and The New York Times’ Paul Krugman have solved our economic problems. They’ve decided that a space alien attack will save us. Aside from the guffaw factor of space aliens, there was so much wrong with this CNN segment that we must lay them out for discussion.
First on the clip is some pinhead from Harvard claiming that “infrastructure spending, that’s great.” He says he’d even borrow money for such programs. This guy thinks that if we had another giant stimulus (like a WWII Works program), why we’d be doing just “great.”
He is, of course, a Keynesian fool. Stimulus does not work. Stimulus has never worked. Further, “stimulus” itself is a misnomer. Take Illinois, for instance. It got millions upon millions of dollars in so-called stimulus money from Obama. Do you know what Illinois did with that money? It paid existing debt, it paid current bills. It “stimulated” nothing with all those millions. This happened all across the country in every state. The “stimulus” did not stimulate anything but instead went to pay exiting bills and created nothing new, supported no new projects. It was a sham.
Amusingly, this guy tried to qualify his support of infrastructure spending saying “as long as it isn’t Big Dig” sort of over spending. The “Big Dig” is a reference to the underground Central Artery/Tunnel Project undertaken by the Boston Metro Highway System that is famous for being a total boondoggle that has gone billions over budget, not to mention having so many structural and engineering failures that the whole thing is a death trap waiting to happen.
Problem is, every state project becomes a version of the Big Dig at some level. At the very least they always, always, always go over budget, at worst they become a pit of political failure and corruption. So, while this Harvard pinhead tried to qualify his position, he did so on a bed of quicksand.
The fact is that Obama’s stimulus was good money down the rat hole to no lugubrious effect and this fool wants more of that? The Harvard prof’s foolishness was bad enough — if not entirely standard leftist boilerplate — but leave it to CNN’s Muslim correspondent Freed Zakaria and purported economist Paul Krugman to take the show even further down the tubes… on the tube.
Zakaria chimed in with the Harvard goof saying that discredited economist John Maynard Keynes would agree that paying a guy government cash to dig a ditch and then fill it back in is “productive employment.”
Sorry, pal, but that is not productive employment. It is make work, it is pointless spending on nothing productive. And, we’ve already seen rather conclusively that it doesn’t help the economy.
And then came a clownish Paul Krugman to enlighten us on his hackneyed economic ideas.
Amusingly, Krugman goes against liberal orthodoxy on what “saved” us in FDR’s era. Most far leftists of his ilk claim that FDR’s useless works programs and massive government spending somehow got us out of the depression. Most logical people realize that it was WWII and its aftermath that got us out (more its aftermath where we rebuilt the world than the war itself).
But Krugman slipped up in his FDR worship. Instead of saying that FDR’s sending saved us, Krugman stated that the war did it.
Think about World War II, that was actually negative social product spending and yet it brought us out (of The Great Depression).
That is quite an admission for a leftist, I’d say. It diminishes Saint Franklin Roosevelt, believe it or not.
And then Krugmen got his clown on by claiming that what we need is a fake alien invasion just like “on the Twilight Zone” to get us all to work together.
Paul Krugman: If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat and inflation and budget deficits took a secondary place to that, this slump would be over in eighteen months. And then if we discovered, woops we made a mistake, there aren’t actually space aliens, we’d be a better…
Forgettable Harvard Prof: So, we need Orsen Wells is what you’re saying…
Paul Clownman: No, there was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. This time we don’t need that we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
Huh? Alien invasion? No, not a mere alien invasion, but a fake one drummed up in order to fool the people into “some fiscal stimulus.”
So, let me get this straight. Paul Clownman is against the Iraq war. He’s against the Afghanistan war. He’s against the Libyan action. He’s against any action against Iran. He calls them all fake wars. Yet he’s for a fake alien invasion?
Can this guy be any more absurd, any more worthless, any less worth taking seriously?
It’s bad enough these losers are still stuck on the failed economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, but space aliens?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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