Some people are just unlearned.  Some people are just stubborn.  Some people are just stupid.  Some people just can’t quit lying.  Paul Krugman has to be the latter.  His argument for why we should still vote Democrat in spite of the fact their economic policies to date have failed miserably is because we shouldn’t return to the prosperity that got us into this mess.  Yeah, you heard me right.  In spite of all the force-fed propaganda, what Paul Krugman et al are telling you are lies that they know, or would have to know, are lies.  Paul Krugman was there in 1999 and 2000.  I bet when he’s drunk out of his mind he still laughs about the “Dot-com bubble” that burst and sent the country into a perilous not-quite recession but pretty bad economic mess.  For those of us who are not Princeton educated economists, we have to read Wikipedia to remind ourselves of it.  Heck, Wiki even has a specific date it burst, March 10, 2000.  With the exploding markets, President Clinton’s Federal Reserve raised interest rates six times doing everything it could to suck the life out of the “irrational exuberance”.  BY March 10, 2000, they succeeded and the markets started receding, soon to be an all-out collapse.  Throughout 2000 the headlines were marked by huge dot-com successes filing for bankruptcy.  They in turn took out other industry giants such as communications and manufacturing.  The corporate graveyard was astounding in 2000.  Then, the NEXT YEAR, President Bush took office.  So, all this BS that things were so fantastic when Bush took office is just flat out lies. Krugman was there.  He knows what happened.  Is that what he thinks we need to return to? Bush inherited a mess, and it only got worse.  Shortly after he took office, 9/11 occurred.  That created a mess on it’s own.  However, starting pretty much to that day, with the assist of the “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy”, the country kicked into one of the longest sustained growths in the country’s history.  It wasn’t crazy irrational growth, it was average, and steady.  There was no inflation, and unemployment stayed fairly steady.  In 2006 the country focused more on perceived personal misfortunes than the economy and voted the Republicans out of control.  Almost on cue, the economy tanked.  Now, Paul Krugman knows this.  He knows who controls the spending budgets.  He knows who controls the Fed rate policies.  He knows just as well as you and I do that when Nancy Pelosi’s economic policies started hitting the markets, they killed it.  Bush wasn’t the one who proposed TARP, he merely did not interfere with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.  They wrote it, the Democrats passed it.  The economy tanked.  Then Obama got his shot at the whole mess.  It tanked even worse. So, what Krugman is telling us is that we need to return to the days when  undocumented book values were taxed at outrageous levels regardless of whether they were real or not.  That successful people should be taxed at somewhere around 60%.  That the federal government should turn its head completely when companies make outrageous leaps in book value with no revenues to speak of.  That banks would leverage completely fictional values against revenues a company never had.  That home values would be allowed to explode for no apparent reason.  And, of course, that it’s the Republicans that are sold out to big business that allowed this to happen while the not-really-Communist Democrats are protecting the little union guy. None of that makes sense.  No one calls Krugman on any of it.  So, him and the New York Times and most other media just keep on repeating it over and over to saturate the internet so it appears that it has to be real. Apparently the average American voter just isn’t that stupid.  Do you remember 2000?  Yes we can!  Do you remember 2007?  Yes we can!

Tags: 1999, 2000, 2006, bubble, burst, dot.com, march 10, new-york-times, paul krugman