Did You Know...

**Written by Doug Powers

Yesterday, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and columnist for the New York Times, appeared on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and had an out of this world idea to turn the economy around:

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Think about World War II, right? That was actually negative social product spending, and yet it brought us out.

I mean, probably because you want to put these things together, if we say, “Look, we could use some inflation.” Ken and I are both saying that, which is, of course, anathema to a lot of people in Washington but is, in fact, what the basic logic says.

It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better–

Oddly enough, after this interview was over, space aliens did show up, but it was only to cancel their subscription to the New York Times. Unfortunately though, the aliens were exposed to our Krugmanized economic atmosphere for too long, which resulted in three of them getting laid off before they could make it back to the spaceship.

Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters ran some of the numbers on the off chance anybody outside select pockets of liberal academia took Krugman seriously:

**Written by Doug Powers

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