Krugman, Keynes and old-school stimulus

I love Paul Krugman. He’s a data-driven economist who speaks his mind. In his New York Times op-ed column, he has bashed the economic policies of both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And when Krugman writes, presidents read.

Krugman, 59, has taught economics at Yale, MIT, Berkeley, the London School of Economics, Stanford and Princeton, while publishing 20 books. And, oh, a little thing –– he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008.

Krugman, a left-leaning economist whose Times blog is bravely titled “The Conscience of a Liberal,” lives in New Jersey, but he grew up in Merrick and graduated from Kennedy High School in Bellmore.

As a journalist who lives in and reports from Merrick and who writes a biweekly column that my critics call left-of-center, I’ve long been interested in what Krugman has to say. In recent years there’s been a constant theme to his columns. Krugman, who reportedly grew up in a modest home in a neighborhood of ranch-style houses in the 1950s and ’60s, worries about the possible dissolution of the nation’s social safety nets –– Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security –– which have pulled millions of Americans out of poverty and have preserved the middle class.

With Tea Party conservatism taking greater hold over the national psyche, we hear a growing chorus of Americans calling for government cuts. The right-wing refrain goes like this: The national debt is ballooning out of control. Our grandchildren’s economy will surely collapse under the weight of our profligacy. With the unemployment rate still above 8 percent, Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan failed to deliver the promised goods. We need tax cuts and deregulation to get the economy moving again.

Since 2009, when Congress passed the stimulus package, Krugman has taken the opposite tack –– we need more, not less, stimulus.