This is the sort of analysis -- the economically ideal, in this instance, removed from political reality -- that achieves intellectual heights of such indescribable uselessness, I find myself increasingly impatient with and even intolerant of it:
What the government should be doing in this situation is spending more while the private sector is spending less.... And this government spending needs to be sustained: we’re not talking about a brief burst of aid....
The Obama team obviously disagrees. As I understand it, the administration believes that all it needs is a little more time and money, that any day now the economic engine will catch and we’ll be on the road back to prosperity.
That's from the distinguished Paul Krugman, in whose brain an imposing Keynesian wisdom seems to have denied space for any serious contemplation of the vulgar, gutter politics with which the Obama administration must engage.
"What the government should be doing in this situation is ..."
Perhaps you recall when some schoolmarmish prude was telling you in junior high that what you should be doing is ... -- rather than fidgeting or doodling or daydreaming of traveling to the southern hemisphere of that new babe in the next row (sorry for the gender-exclusivesness). Yes, eating your schoolwork vegetables is of course what you -- we -- should have been doing, precisely at the time that our profound adolescence and striking immaturity prevented us from doing it.
Think Congressional Republicans, adolescent pols and immature crackpots extraordinaire. Does schoolmarm Krugman really believe that his words this morning will ever meet with their fidgeting, doodling, daydreaming approval?
He's right, he's unquestionably, unarguably, painfully right about the economics of "this situation": government should be spending like it's WWII. Extending upper-end tax cuts is a fiscal insult and political disgrace and the rest of the compromise deal -- excepting, prominently, the renewal of unemployment benefits -- promises but "modestly better [economic] performance" (which, 9-out-of-10 polled agree, is preferable to modestly worse economic performance).
But Paul, you see, the thing is, it's all they -- the Obama administration -- have got. It's all they can do. They don't "obviously disagree" with you or John Maynard Keynes. They can read economic models and comprehend these-or-those projections, too; the straight-A, geek-kids club is more populated than you think, Paul.
In this space I daily resist polemics. I really do. Or, well, I try anyway. But when I read liberal polemics (the right-wing species is both hopeless and overmonitored) masquerading as in-the-game intellectualism -- What we need is direct and massive stimulus, urges Krugman repeatedly, when there's a more realistic chance that I'll win the Nobel Peace Prize next year -- I find myself, as noted, growing intolerant, and thus equally polemical.
For that I apologize, to myself. I'll try to do better, for you the reader. Mr. Krugman, will you?