Recent Krugman

Catching up on my Paul Krugman, some good ones:

Reflexively anti-Bush. "Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational."

How big is $9 trillion?. "Again, the debt outlook is bad. But we’re not looking at something inconceivable, impossible to deal with; we’re looking at debt levels that a number of advanced countries, the US included, have had in the past, and dealt with."

Picturing purgatory. "Notice that this is NOT just saying that unemployment is a lagging indicator. In 2001-2003 the job market continued to get worse for a year and a half after GDP turned up. The bad times could easily last longer this time."

A note on the Bush fiscal legacy. "What would things look like if we hadn’t had 8 years of gross fiscal irresponsibility from the Bush adminstration?...And that, in turn, means that we’d be looking at projected net debt in 2019 of around 50 percent of GDP, not 70...the irresponsibility of the Bush years has left us poorly positioned to deal with the current crisis, turning what should have been an easily financed economic rescue into a more difficult, anxiety-producing process."