Paul Krugman's got it right again, with a post mocking David Broder, taking him to task on the subject of Al Franken, whom Broder calls "the loud-mouthed former comedian".
That doesn't sit well with Krugman, who points out "Al Franken's dirty secret is that ... he's a big policy wonk."
I used to go on Franken's radio show, all ready to be jocular - and what he wanted to talk about was the arithmetic of Social Security, or the structure of Medicare Part D.
In fact, the only elected official I know who's wonkier than Al Franken is Rush Holt, my congressman - and he used to be the assistant director of Princeton's plasma physics lab. (The campaign's bumper stickers read, "My Congressman IS a rocket scientist.")
So what will Franken do to the level of Senate discourse? He'll raise it.
Krugman's slam-dunk right about Franken. As huntsu mentioned to me this morning, you have to understand politics be able to satirize it. Franken always did that well.
During the 2005 Governor's race, my boyfriend and I helped put together an event at the Stress Factory Comedy Club for Corzine. A kind of fusion event - part fundraiser, part message. We had Franken on stage riffing on the piped-in live audio of the last Corzine/Doug Forrester debate. Corzine creamed Forrester; in the club we heard it punctuated by Franken's rat-a-tat-tat off-the-cuff reactions. He was pretty specific, and it was a lot of fun listending to him stick pointy knives into Forrester.
It was worth waiting 20 years for the Al Franken Decade. Particularly since Franken will hold his friend Paul Wellstone's seat in the Senate.
The governor, a former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment giant, said Monday's nearly 500-point stock rally showed the markets think the plan unveiled by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner "may very well work." He said its combination of public and private financing "minimizes risk" and takes the "worst case off the table," so investors would not lose everything.
If banks are willing to sell the bad assets at "rough market prices," ranging from 80 cents on the dollar to 20 cents on the dollar to other values, "I think we could see a positive turnaround with regard to our financial system," and in turn the economy, when lending perks up, Corzine said.
If banks won't do that and private investors don't bite, "We will continue to have a clogged up financial system" weighed down by the risky real estate assets, the governor said.
Corzine said the debts could be a good investment for pension funds, including those run by states, if the fund managers price the assets realistically.
Here is the full audio from the show so you can hear for yourself:
Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), one of the "centrists" who has worked to make the stimulus package less stimulating, mocked Paul Krugman's critique of the "moderates" like this:
"Well, y'know, I don't know where he's from, but I'll tell you, in Nebraska ..."
Senator, I was born in Albany, grew up on Long Island, and now I live in New Jersey. You got a problem with that?
Well, Senator, I was born in St. Louis (the heartland just like Nebraska!), grew up in Jersey, went to college in Wisconsin (the heartland again!) and am raising my family in Jersey. You got a problem with that?
What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?
A proud centrist.
As Jim Hightower says in a book, the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.
I doubt this was the Nobel Prize academy's intent, but the awarding of the laurel in economics to Paul Krugman really brings down the curtain on the age of Milton Friedman. Just as Friedman's dogmas about free markets and deregulation were the foundation for the shaky edifice of conservative "max out the credit cards and let magic marketplace fairies pay the bills" economic thinking, Krugman's sobersided views on how government intervention helped set the stage for sustained and widespread prosperity in mid-20th-century America can guide us as we dig ourselves out of the pit into which Milton's Minions have thrown us. With books like The Great Unraveling and The Return of Depression Economics, Krugman gave us the number of the truck that was about to hit America's (and the world's) financial markets. Friedman, let it be noted, was a Rutgers boy before he became one of the Chicago Boys. Krugman teaches at Princeton. So how's that for your Jersey connection? And here's how one Nobel laureate gave another his due, while also explaining where he went wrong.
