Paul Krugman Quotes
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. ... There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
Krugman, Paul. Interview by Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN, 14 Aug. 2011.
Specie is a word for paper money. Such political artifices were well known in More’s time, and yet still exist in many countries.
His argument was that the government role in the economy was to maintain full employment and to hold inflation in check. His argument was that if these to things should be done whatever the government did to maintain that was fine. Today, we argue about every aspect of the economy and many believe that full employment and inflation control are contradictory. He would have both and make the other things give. No government has ever yet tried his approach though he was very popular amongst libertarian and free market economists.
Johnson could be incredibly gross and earthy. However, as undignified as his analogy was, everyone understood his insult to Jerry Ford’s economic ideas. Ford was one of the House Republican leaders at the time.
The speech was actually drafted by Peter Jay, his son-in-law and a journalist. The leader of the left-wing Labour party, to the surprise and anger of many of the party stalwarts, was repudiating Keynesianism which had been basic to the party for years. This appears to be the first specific statement that a government cannot spend its way out of a recession. Conservatives have used it ever since in countries throughout the world. The truth of the Keynes proscription is in constant modern economic and political debate with no resolution likely soon.
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.
