Exactly. The most important reason Ds got shellacked in 2010 was that the Obama stimulus was underpowered given the severity of the crisis, largely because of the desire to be bipartisan and not use reconciliation 1/
Not hindsight. What I wrote in January 2009 krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/sti…
Voters don't care, or by and large even know about, process. They won't be outraged if Biden uses aggressive tactics to enact stimulus. They will, however, punish his party if they don't see concrete economic gains 3/
It's OK if Biden spends a couple of days urging Rs to support his agenda. But when they don't, go big and fast; get money out the door. 4/

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More from @paulkrugman

15 Jan
Gonna do a brief (?) wonkish thread on debt sustainability, and why we shouldn't worry about it. Start with the reason many people think it's terrible: they imagine that debt snowballs, because the more debt you have the higher your interest payments, so you run up even more 1/
This happens to individuals and businesses! And it could in principle happen to the U.S. government. But the arithmetic is all wrong — so wrong that even if borrowing costs rise in the future it's just not likely to be an issue 2/
One reason is that the real value of debt is eroded by inflation. Real interest rates are currently negative, and overall real interest payments, as Furman and Summers point out, are at historic lows 3/ piie.com/research/piie-… Image
Read 7 tweets
13 Jan
Scott Sumner has an interesting (to me at least) podcast with David Beckworth on the "Princeton School of macroeconomics," which included yours truly and a guy name Ben Bernanke (whatever happened to him?) 1/ mercatus.org/bridge/podcast…
I am still proud of the 1998 paper that sort of started this. It holds up pretty well — and it was also an illustration of the case for economic modeling 2/ brookings.edu/bpea-articles/…
I began working on this issue because I was disturbed by Japan's apparent inability to break out of deflation. I started with a strong intuition that the Bank of Japan just wasn't trying hard enough — that if it just printed enough money that would work 3/
Read 5 tweets
12 Jan
The economic consequences of the putsch: very far from the most important thing, but the markets seem remarkably sanguine given what just went down. Bonds, in particular, are signaling new optimism about recovery 1/
Is this crazy? Not really. For one thing, last week also included the D upset in GA, which greatly increased the odds for adequate economic relief. Predictit on Senate control 2/
Also, political turmoil, even violent, doesn't have much economic impact unless it turns into actual civil war. Race riots and Vietnam coincided with a middle-class boom 3/
Read 6 tweets
11 Jan
A really good question. Someone should do a careful archival study of when pedophilia became the go-to accusation; did it start with Q or was it already there? But in a way it fits a pattern 1/
Hofstadter's "The paranoid style" noted the preoccupation of conspiracy theorists with sex 2/ harpers.org/archive/1964/1…
Relevant passage 3/
Read 5 tweets
10 Jan
What's so astonishing about this is that it's not responding to any real grievances. No, the election wasn't stolen. No, Dems aren't Marxists — or pedophiles. No, BLM didn't go on a deadly rampage (but rightists did). And many of these people have fairly comfortable lives 1/
And we're not like Mussolini's Italy or Weimar Germany, bitter over a catastrophic war and, in Germany, a catastrophic depression (no, it wasn't the hyperinflation that did it — it was the gold standard) 2/
The best guess is that it's about race — about white people infuriated by growing diversity. And maybe the GOP's cynical cultivation of racial hostility in the service of plutocracy encouraged it 3/
Read 7 tweets
10 Jan
So all the Trumpists seem far more upset about losing Twitter followers than they are over a violent assault on the US Congress. This isn't just digusting; it's terrifying 1/
We're still learning about how the Capitol got stormed, but it seems obvious that responsible officials more or less deliberately avoided providing adequate security 2/ businessinsider.com/trump-attempte…
Given that, the absence of any sign of remorse or regret is frightening. Many bad things can happen over the next 10 days, up to and including violent disruption of the inauguration itself. 3/
Read 4 tweets

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