It's hard not to give considerable weight to Paul Krugman's endlessly repeated warnings -- and complaints once the warnings went unheeded -- that the Feb. 2009 stimulus was too small. In this narrative, the cautious trimming that led Obama to put forward a proposal too weighted to tax cuts and appropriating less than 2/3 the total originally recommended by Christina Romer failed to jump-start true recovery and thus destroyed Obama's political capital.
Can being right too often be hazardous to your intellectual health? Krugman warned us from Feb 2000 forward about the voodoo math behind the Bush tax cuts; he warned in 2005 about the housing bubble; he warned from February 2009 forward that the proposed stimulus was too small. [Update: He was also right about the the Iraq war and the Euro.] Being right and unheeded creates a Cassandra syndrome: you prophesy, and you feel in your bones that the leadership won't listen. Hence Krugman slips in Glenn Greenwald mode -- concocting a simplified counterfactual in which, under his policies, everything would have been okay, whereas current policy is leading straight to disaster.
Can being right too often be hazardous to your intellectual health? Krugman warned us from Feb 2000 forward about the voodoo math behind the Bush tax cuts; he warned in 2005 about the housing bubble; he warned from February 2009 forward that the proposed stimulus was too small. [Update: He was also right about the the Iraq war and the Euro.] Being right and unheeded creates a Cassandra syndrome: you prophesy, and you feel in your bones that the leadership won't listen. Hence Krugman slips in Glenn Greenwald mode -- concocting a simplified counterfactual in which, under his policies, everything would have been okay, whereas current policy is leading straight to disaster.
