What Krugman Said

While I agree with almost everything Paul Krugman says I often find his TV appearances frustrating. It seems he never has enough time to make a convincing point. He's often on This Week opposite George Will and they both say some statistic and explain "what the real problem is" and neither side wins, or at least convinces anyone to change their mind. Still I watch.

This morning on the opening segment were Krugman and Will and two campaign spokespeople, Eric Fehrnstrom for Romney and Stephanie Cutter for Obama. They talked about the jobs report and budgets and who and fix the economy, etc. After both campaign people spoke about Solyndra Krugman said the following:

"We're talking as if a billion dollars was a lot of money and in a $15 trillion economy it's not. Solyndra was a mistake as part of a large program which has been by and large had a pretty good track record. Of course you're going to find a mistake, to be fair that's probably true in Massachusetts as well. But this is ridiculous that we are taking these tiny tiny missteps which happen in any large organization including corporations. Bain Capital had losers too right, even from the point of view of its investors. So this is ridiculous and the fact of the matter is this president has not managed to get very much of what he wanted done. It's terribly unfair that he's being judged on the failure of the economy to respond to policies that have been largely dictated by a hostile Congress."

I completely agree. I don't care about Solyndra or dogs on cars or bullying from 45 years ago. I care about policies. I'm sure the right will say Krugman is so out of touch he doesn't care about a billion dollars. He rightly eschews comparisons between the national economy and a household budget but to put his comment in those terms; the median household income is $49.390, by comparison Solyndra to the US economy is like worrying about $3.38.

I noticed one strange thing about the program, when most people were talking the camera had a static closeup on the speaker. They switched between some two shots and long distance shots but always with clean cuts. A few times the camera slowly zoomed in on the speaker which has the affect of making the comments a little more intimate. How often is a few? Well they did it once on George Will and ten times on Eric Fehrnstrom. Sure, four of them were more minor, but six of them were big obvious zooms while he was speaking, slowing making his face fill the center of the screen as he made his point. Maybe it was just difficultly with a cameraman or assistant director but it didn't always happen and it never happened to someone representing the left. Hmmmm....