Dashing Tom Daschle and Krazy Paul Krugman

Couple of notes on this schmuck

1) Not paying $100,000+ for taxes is just not acceptable for anybody let alone somebody working for the cabinet. So don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

2) He may have been the best person for the job, so this mess probably put health care reform back 5 years.. thanks Jackass

3) Somebody tell this clown that the Sally Jessie Rafael look is NOT a good one.

The Mrs and I Just went to see “A Conversation with Paul Krugman” and apparently he’s got the a very close up view of the Stimulus package.

His take:

• the stimulus package is NOT big enough, probably should be about 1.5 trillion dollars.. try to wrap yourself around that number because that is what he thinks it might take to stave off a recession
• The stimulus package includes some crap, some things he doesn’t like and some things which are OK but probably not the best bang-for-your-buck but all-in-all it sounds like a good package. Infrastructure things add about $1.50 to the GDP for every $1 spent.
• since a lot of infrastructure stuff isn’t “shovel ready” they couldn’t put much more to it right now since this is still politics and with mid-term elections around the corner they needed something more immediate.. money needs to be spent now not in 10 years
• in general all the money going to extending unemployment and money going to Medicaid is necessary in a time like this.. working people (or people looking for work) need to be taken care of.
• Although corporate tax cuts aren’t the end of the world it is not his preferred method of stimulus since companies will probably not use the money to hire new employees and make long term capital expenditures right now will save it or pass it along to shareholders, owners, etc.

But the project Krugman thinks the stimulus which the bill leaves out because Obama doesn’t want to go to battle with this right now is the one that would actually make the biggest difference is health-care reform. Well now back to Daschle… the stimulus he fights for more than anything is health-care reform. Social Security was created as part of the New Deal during the depression so this is not unprecedented during this financial mess.

His point is that if we had more of a universal health-care it would take long-term burden off businesses since health-care is what is crippling business and would allow them to make more capital investments and hire more people which would both stimulate the economy, help the unemployment rate and start producing more products.  He said that Medicaid costs 40% less than normal health-care so it actually is a much more efficient dollar-for-dollar program than anything we have today.

 
now my review of
Now my review of the Krugman thing.


1) In general everybody in the audience respects him too much or just doesn’t have a strong opinion on what he is talking about, so none of the audience questions took anything he said to task. Take this same format and put Thomas Friedman on the stage and you may have a riot of chicken feathers

2) We were easily 20 years younger than the median age at this thing. It was a crowd of about 250 people and 248 of them were either 65 year Jewish people trained in from Long-Island or 65 year old Jewish people bused in from Northern New Jersey.

3) He didn’t take Bush to task for much, actually kind of conceding that this was much more a Reaganomics issue which Clinton participated in.. the one who got beat up was Crazy Allan Greenspan.

4) The moderator, Andy Rosenthal (the editor of the opinion pages at the New York Times) was way too buddy-buddy with Krugman.. You need a moderator to put some hard questions in front of these guys, not just let them babble

5) Krugman is about the hardest person to listen to as he takes forever to get a point out. The topics and his insight are very interesting but it feels like he would cover twice the material if he could just get it out of this mouth.


sorry for the somewhat serious blog-post today, we'll be back to making fun of people and stories about diarrhea tomorrow ..