Krugman: "Centrist Heros" exploiting a crisis to push an agenda totally unrelated to that crisis.

[kpete]

Krugman: exploiting a crisis to push an agenda totally unrelated to that crisis.
February 20, 2012, 8:12 PM
Hoover/Brüning 2012

But thinking about today’s column, I realized that it’s even worse than that. What defines centrist heroes, as far as I can tell, is that they are people who, faced with a catastrophic slump driven by private-sector abuses, and a severe shortfall of spending, declared that our most urgent priority is … to reduce budget deficits.

That’s often described as a courageous position, but it’s actually anything but: nobody in the Beltway dinner-party circuit has ever been ostracized for demanding entitlement cuts. And aside from being totally conventional, it’s also deeply wrong-headed — and if you ask me somewhat unethical, too, because it involves exploiting a crisis to push an agenda totally unrelated to that crisis.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/hooverbruning-2012/

[bobbycoxs]

1. Agreed

Could not agree more, it's easy to say cut when you don't even pay for your own dinner. Check out one of my favorite new heroes.

http://www.andmagazine.com/contributors/22_claude_morton.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. This is a dig at his fellow columnist Tom Friedman, who backed David Walker on Sunday

Friedman's column (non-NYT link, for those not registered: http://www.chron.com/news/article/Friedman-Nation-needs-a-third-voice-in-2012-3342969.php )

Dean Baker's comment:

Walker has been in the public over for more than a decade as a result of his crusade against the government budget deficit. In fact, he led a "fiscal wake-up tour" around the country in the years 2004-2008 to try to call attention to the problem of the budget deficit.

The great irony of this tour is that the deficit was not actually a big problem at the time, falling to just over 1.0 percent of GDP by 2007. The real problem facing the country was the housing bubble, which was growing ever larger. Unfortunately, people like David Walker and his merry band of deficit hawks, financed by the the likes of Peter Peterson, sucked up much of the oxygen for coverage of economic issues. There were many news shows and stories devoted to their apocalyptic warnings of budget doom. There was no time to waste talking to people yelling about things like an $8 trillion housing bubble.

Thomas Friedman's Candidate for President: The Leader of the Economic Sleepwalk Tour

And why this is more serious than just one columnist talkign about his ideal candidate:

Okay, so my strangers-with-the-magic-beans point in re: Politico is looking better and better. You may recall Americans Elect, the intrepid team of unicorn wrangling hedge-fund cowboys who seem convinced that what we're all a'hankerin' for around the old corral is somebody with the gravitas of a titan like Evan Bayh to get us to stop all this hootin' and hollerin' and politickin' with each other so we can calm down and let him govern us from the sensible center — which is to say, gut Social Security and Medicare while feelin' all peckish about it and keepin' our cotton-pickin' hands away from anything like, say, a sensible transactions tax. Yee-haw.

Well, it seems like they've settled on their man — David Walker, longtime frontman for Peter Peterson, the crusading money-manager who's been lusting to get his paws on the Social Security trust fund since god was a boy. Tom Friedman, who never met a fake centrist he wouldn't take to the prom, went over the falls for Walker on Sunday. I'm surprised there wasn't a Tunisian cab driver chiming in....
...
And who's the political genius behind this enterprise? Why it's Lynn deForester Rothschild, former Jon Huntsman bundler — and what a triumph that was — and nutty PUMA leftover from the 2008 campaign. Just the people's crusade for which I'm looking, that's for sure. And this...

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/david-walker-6766543#ixzz1n2JzCm7t