Making the Economy Worse by Saying We Cannot Do Anything about Avoidable Problems

© 2010 Peter Free

 

02 August 2010

 

More activists on the anti-plutocracy train

 

Professor Paul Krugman appears to be joining us in railing against the American plutocracy that has displaced our democracy.

 

Writing in the New York Times, Krugman said the power elite will soon declare high unemployment to be a structural problem, about which we can do nothing.  The elite will excuse themselves from acting because:

 

We’re told that we can’t afford to help the unemployed — that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the “bond vigilantes” will send U.S. borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks’ imagination — far from fleeing U.S. debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows. But the fearmongers are unmoved: fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything else — everything else, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.

 

© 2010 Paul Krugman, Defining Prosperity Down, New York Times (01 Aug 2010)

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/opinion/02krugman.html?ref=columnists

 

Dr. Krugman predicts that two years from now, unemployment will still be high, perhaps even higher than today.

 

The structural unemployment excuse will have turned long-unemployed workers into unemployable workers, due to lost skills and disappeared business/industry networking connections.

 

The Plutocracy’s false prophecy will have created an otherwise avoidable reality.