Krugman has his own version of "A Christmas Carol"
Indulge me while I tell you a story — a near-future version of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” It begins with sad news: young Timothy Cratchit, a k a Tiny Tim, is sick. And his treatment will cost far more than his parents can pay out of pocket.
Fortunately, our story is set in 2014, and the Cratchits have health insurance. Not from their employer: Ebenezer Scrooge doesn’t do employee benefits. And just a few years earlier they wouldn’t have been able to buy insurance on their own because Tiny Tim has a pre-existing condition, and, anyway, the premiums would have been out of their reach.
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Best Paul Krugman blog post title yet:
Darling, I love you
OK, that’s way too strong. But Alistair Darling’s new super-tax on bank bonuses sounds like a good idea, on first read. Or as Justin Fox puts it, why the heck not?
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It's never easy being
CassandraWhat I said in July 2008:
The US government will have to do two things to fix the coming world-wide economic crisis - create a jobs program, as it did during the Great Depression, and put a cap on the interest rates charged by credit card companies.
What Paul Krugman said today:
Meanwhile, the federal government could provide jobs by ... providing jobs. It’s time for at least a small-scale version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, one that would offer relatively low-paying (but much better than nothing) public-service employment.
Not that I'm accusing Krugman of not listening to me - my understanding of economics is hugely influenced by him in the first place. No - Krugman is a Cassandra too, although as a NYTimes columnist and a Nobel Prize winner, he is occasionally listened to - and I wish he had made a point of talking about jobs programs sooner.
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