Have legitimate concerns about the national debt? Well, you may just be one of those GOP “economic terrorists,” according to New York Times bloviator-in-chief Paul Krugman.
Krugman’s Jan. 19 column spewed bile at GOP congressional members seeking spending concessions from President Joe Biden on the debt ceiling issue. “Don’t Try to Appease Economic Terrorists,” the headline read. Yes, Krugman actually used the word “terrorists.” [Emphasis added.]
He sugar-coated the issue falsely claiming that raising the debt ceiling “simply allows the government to honor its promises, which include everything from paying interest on its debt to sending checks to Social Security recipients.”
He lectured that “[n]o, raising the debt limit doesn’t give the president free rein to spend whatever he wants.” This is just dumb semantics. Raising the debt ceiling ad infinitum gives the government a pass to borrow as much as it wants to service the current debt, thereby sinking the U.S. economy further into debt by racking up the bills (the U.S. national debt is over $31 trillion now).
Krugman then peddled an outright falsehood: “These promises, duly authorized by Congress, exceed the expected amount of taxes and other revenue, so they must be met in part through borrowing.” But Economist Daniel Mitchell pointed out that Congressional Budget Office data show that “annual tax revenue this fiscal year is going to be more than 11 times greater than annual interest payments.” [Emphasis added.]
In essence, Mitchell said, “[t]here’s plenty of money to pay interest on the debt.” But Krugman bemoaned that Republicans were primed to “weaponize” a so-called “quirk” in the U.S. budget process that requires Congress after passing buget legislation to “vote again to authorize the Treasury to raise the funds needed to follow the law." Earth to Krugman! [Emphasis added.]
The issue that Krugman seems to always sweep under the rug is the government's decades-long habit of treating taxpayer dollars like its Monopoly money. The irresponsible $1.7 trillion pork-riddled omnibus spending bill is just the latest example. Former Kansas City Federal Reserve President Thomas Hoenig told MRC Business that “the problem [with the debt ceiling] is that there is no check on creating the debt.”
He’s right. “In fiscal year (FY) 2022, the government spent $6.27 trillion, which was more than it collected (revenue), resulting in a deficit,” the U.S. Treasury reported. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote that the U.S. public debt is now 100% of GDP. In turn, “Spendthrifts should pay their debts, but they should also have their credit card pulled, or at least limited, so they can’t keep piling up unpaid bills,” said The Journal. But in Krugman's pathetic view, "[t]he Biden administration is facing the threat of economic terrorism" from the GOP. [Emphasis added.]
Krugman even rehashed an old nutty “financial engineering” proposal he’d been selling for years: mint a $1 trillion coin! “The most famous proposal calls for minting a platinum coin with a face value of, say, $1 trillion, depositing that coin with the Federal Reserve and spending out of the bank account thus created,”he wrote. “Believe it or not, this would almost certainly be legal.” [Emphasis added.]
Uh, no. Florida Atlantic University Associate Professor of Economics William Luther noted Sept. 28, 2021 on Twitter that the $1 trillion coin scheme propagated by nonsensical elitists like Krugman would require the Treasury to mint a “platinum token coin,” meaning, “a platinum coin with a face value that *exceeds* the value of its metallic content. Unfortunately, the Treasury is not authorized to mint a platinum token coin.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen even called the idea a “gimmick.”
Krugman’s $1 trillion coin proposal was so idiotic that even liberal comedian Jon Stewart made fun of him in 2013 when he tried to rebuke Stewart as being “lazy” for panning it. Stewart stated during a 2013 segment in response to Krugman that the $1 trillion coin was a “stupid f**king idea.” Raising the debt ceiling without even considering any major cuts to spending to avoid greatly exacerbating the national debt further is also a stupid idea.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 800-698-4637 and demand it distance itself from Krugman’s nonsense calling GOP congressional members “economic terrorists."
