Paul Krugman Quotes
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Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.
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The planet will continue to cook.
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I think if you're a liberal, you believe that we all are, at least to some extent, our brothers' keepers, you really believe that we have a sumptuary responsibility to make sure that life is decent for everybody in America, that you believe that society out to be broadly shared, and you believe that you can't have a real democracy unless you have a little bit, at least, of economic democracy.
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So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment.
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I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law.
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In America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception - namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power.
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So, very early reports are that Obamacare exchanges are, as expected, having some technical glitches on the first day - maybe even a bit worse than expected, because it appears that volume has been much bigger than predicted. Here’s what you need to know: this is good, not bad, news for the program... Lots of people logging on and signing up on the very first day... is an early indication that it’s going to be fine, that plenty of people will sign up for the first year of health reform.
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The trouble with poverty, as an issue, is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public.
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There's nothing magic about spending on tanks and bombs rather than roads and bridges.
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The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.
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The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.
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If the price of everything is going down, that's going to include wages as well. People will have an incentive to sit on their cash and not spend it.
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As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.
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One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement” made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education.
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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.
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To the extent that sacrifices need to be made, shouldn't the people who've made out like bandits this past generation be first in line? The problem with getting out of the slump is that we need to spend more. It's not that somebody needs to spend less. We have idle workers who have the skills and the willingness to work. We have idle factories. Dealing with this is not about saying somebody needs to suffer. It's saying that we need to be prepared to open the taps.
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Consumer spending is now plunging at serious-recession rate ... even if the rescue now in train succeeds in unfreezing credit markets, the real economy has immense downward momentum. In addition to financial rescues, we need major stimulus programs.
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Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.
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I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.
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I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you're in late or latish middle age.
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A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble...
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I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.
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I don't want a job in the administration; I think I'm more effective carping from the sidelines.
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Debt increases that didn't arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.