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Battle of the Economists

by coldwarrior ( 8 Comments › )
Filed under Academia, Economy, Special Report at February 9th, 2012 - 8:21 pm

Sachs with the overhand right!  Next thing you know they will be hitting each other with IS/LM graphs!

 

Q

By Alex Kowalski and Tom Keene – Feb 9, 2012 3:14 PM ET

 

Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman isn’t paying enough attention to growing U.S. government debt as he promotes deficit spending, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs said.

“Krugman has staked out a rather crude Keynesian position and unrelentingly so,” Sachs said today, referring to John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who advocated government spending to spur economic growth during the Great Depression. Krugman “knows one thing, which is stimulus, stimulus, stimulus and expand deficit spending,” Sachs said in a television interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Ken Prewitt and Tom Keene.

Total federal debt held by the public has more than doubled as a share of gross domestic product in the last decade. It totaled 72 percent of GDP last year, compared with 35 percent in 2000, according to calculations by the Office of Management and Budget.

Krugman didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail or telephone request seeking comment.

On Feb. 6, Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and a New York Times columnist, wrote in his “Economics and Politics” blog that the U.S. economy was in a depression because an excess supply of savings prevented full employment. Government spending would help “reduce that incipient surplus,” he wrote.

“Paul has a powerful bully pulpit in his New York Times column, and he’s been on one theme for three years,” Sachs said. Krugman has “under-emphasized the risks of growing debt, he’s over-asserted what we really know about the effects of these policies and he has underestimated the long-term need for public-sector change and reform,” Sachs said.

Warring ‘Ideologues’

To be sure, Krugman is “battling ideologues on the other side who have been equally extreme,” Sachs said. “This brawl is really a brawl of extreme positions,” he said. “It’s not very illuminating, but it is rather entertaining.”

Offering Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney advice, Sachs said that “simply cutting government spending in order to be able to enable tax cuts is going to be seen as terribly unfair.” Such a policy wouldn’t address the need for more investment in education, research and development, and infrastructure, he said.

 

 

 

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8 Responses to “Battle of the Economists”
( jump to bottom )

  1. mawskrat
    1 | February 10, 2012 8:49 am

    I thoufgt it was saturday for
    a moment//


  2. eaglesoars
    2 | February 10, 2012 9:48 am

    Who gives a monkey’s butt what Sachs has to say about anything. This is the sleaze ball POS who accused Victor Davis Hanson of being responsible for getting us into war

    JEFFREY SACHS: Anything that Hanson says I’m likely to disagree with, cause no commentator has done more harm to the American people actually than that guy who led us into all these disastrous wars. But aside from that –

    and he was part and parcel of the Harvard Mafia that economically raped Russia. Havard had to pay millions in settlements

    here

    and

    here


  3. yenta-fada
    3 | February 10, 2012 11:24 am

    @ eaglesoars:

    Larry Summers lost a ton of Harvard’s money in other ways. The Harvard name still covers up a multitude of sins. These Ivy League people manage to wiggle themselves into positions where no one who wants to keep their reputation can disagree with them. Protect me from my ‘betters’./


  4. yenta-fada
    4 | February 10, 2012 11:30 am

    By the way, does anybody notice that Mario Monti who is now Italy’s Prime Minister has never been elected. Somehow, he just appeared on the scene from the Eurocracy and is managing Italy’s financial crisis.
    *shrugs shoulders*


  5. yenta-fada
    5 | February 10, 2012 11:41 am

    Argentina limiting amounts of daily financial transactions for customers. Not saying here that we are Argentina though. Just interesting.

    http://en.mercopress.com/2012/02/09/argentina-limits-daily-financial-transaction-per-person-to-1.000-pesos-230-dollars?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily


  6. eaglesoars
    6 | February 10, 2012 1:23 pm

    yenta-fada wrote:

    By the way, does anybody notice that Mario Monti who is now Italy’s Prime Minister has never been elected. Somehow, he just appeared on the scene from the Eurocracy and is managing Italy’s financial crisis.
    *shrugs shoulders*

    Everybody noticed – with approval. National Sovereignty isn’t on the EU agenda

    Also, I enjoyed my first cup of Russian Caravan today. Heavenly.


  7. yenta-fada
    7 | February 10, 2012 3:27 pm

    @ eaglesoars:

    Glad you like it. Not my cup of tea though. :-)


  8. coldwarrior
    8 | February 11, 2012 12:21 am

    eaglesoars wrote:

    Who gives a monkey’s butt what Sachs has to say about anything.

    a lot of people.

    he talks, peeps jump. like him or not, that is the reality, sorry.


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