Paul Krugman Myths

Paul Krugman Paul Krugman is one of the most successful columnists in The New York Times. Some of his best articles that helped him win a Nobel Prize on October 13, 2008 were “The Great Illusion;” “Fuels on the Hill,” and “Running Out of Planet to Exploit.” Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and is also a professor of Economics at Princeton University. Mr. Krugman received his Bachelor’s Degree from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977 and has also taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. Krugman has his own blog called “The Conscience of a Liberal” where he reported that he was a distant relative of David Frum who is a conservatist that has been fired by the American Enterprise
Institute. Although Krugman’s distant relative is a conservative, Paul Krugman is a Liberal because first of all, his blog is titled “The Conscience of a Liberal” and second is because of the way he views economics, health reforms, uprisings in the Middle East. Paul Krugman shows traits of being a Liberal because of the ways he views economics. In Krugman’s article, “Deep Hole Economics”, he talks about how the economy is very much stabilized because as he said, “Construction shows no sign of returning to bubble-era levels, nor is there any indications that debt-burdened families

Nguyen 2 are going back to their old habits of spending all they earned.” Even though he talks about how this is good news, he is still worried that policy makers will feel more relaxed about some of the economic issues and decide that they will no longer need to continue the economy’s recovery. Even if the economy is stabilized the unemployment rate is about 10 percent according to the arithmetic of job creation so in order to fix that, Krugman said, “we have to grow around 2.5 percent a year just to keep up with rising productivity and population, and hence keep unemployment from rising.” Only a liberal would think that way because if he was a conservatist, he wouldn’t be thinking about the rise of productivity. Later on in Krugman’s article, his attitude is very depressing because he points out that even if the U.S. were to gain a 2.5 percent in employment rate a year, it takes about 2 percent to shave off 1 percent in unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is 10 and then he throws this comment at us that “the math says that even with that kind of growth the unemployment rate would be close to 9 percent at the end of this year, and still above 8 percent at the end of 2012. We wouldn’t get to anything resembling full employment until late in Sarah Palin’s first presidential term.” So to restate his main point, Krugman was basically saying that even if citizens were to receive some good news on the economy, they still need to know that we are still at the bottom of the hole and that hopefully policy makers will understand this so they don’t do anything reckless to the economy.
Another way that Paul Krugman has demonstrated some traits of being a Liberal is by talking about the health reforms and what he would want. In Krugman’s article, Nguyen 3
“Health Reform Myths,” he talks about some of the myths on health care.
The first myth he stated is about the government taking over one-sixth of the economy which is the share of the G.D.P. (Growth Domestic Product) that is currently spent on health. He said that this myth has already happened a long time ago when all government healthcare programs started paying for almost half of the American’s health care, but then he argues that the health care has many downfalls such as individuals who can’t get employment based coverage buy their own insurance, no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and a huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. Another myth he stated was about the proposed health care that does nothing to control the cost and in Krugman’s article; the way they supported this claim, as Krugman stated, “critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it” and in comparison Krugman argues that “what the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs.” So Krugman believes that this myth is false and health cares can control the cost. Krugman said that if having medic care for everyone was a choice, he would’ve voted for
it. In Paul Krugman’s article, “Droughts, Floods and Food,” he talks about the uprisings in the Middle East because of global warming. He said that food prices in the
Middle East have increased because it was a lot harder to farm due to a record high Nguyen 4 temperature in 2010. Farming was difficult and the agricultural production was greatly decreased which means the increase of food prices. One example Krugman gave us that relates to the increase in food because of global warming is that “the Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.”
In this article, Krugman’s attitude towards the Middle East isn’t very polite because he sounds a bit jealous when he blames global warming for the uprising in the
Middle East. He makes it sound like it’s a really bad thing and that it should be the
Americans that is rising.