<p>He pulls out the knives he usually saves for Bush and company.</p>
<p>example please?</p>
<p>Are you talking about the guy who writes for the NY Times? </p>
<p>The NY Times endorsed Hillary before Super Tuesday.</p>
<p>The NY Post endorses Obama.</p>
<p>Krugman doesn’t like the fact that Obama preaches “just getting along” and bipartisanship. It’s the same criticism Edwards had of Obama when he said “you don’t nice the Republicans into cooperating with you.”</p>
<p>As an Obama supporter, I nonetheless agree with much of what Krugman says. It’s my biggest concern about Obama. When the good feeling dies down – assuming Obama’s elected – and Republicans still want tax cuts for just the rich people (so they can invest the money in the Chinese stock market), if Obama doesn’t go along he’ll find that bipartisanship has its limits.</p>
<p>He is an economist apparently
From the Chronicle for higher education
</p>
<p>Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize economist teaching at Princeton (formerly at MIT).</p>
<p>He is an excellent economist but when it comes to politics, he is extremely partisan and does not make use of the solid evidence that economists ordinarily (including Krugman) use to make their points. I stopped reading him quite a while ago, well before the campaign began.</p>
<p>hmmm - “visceral hostility”? I thought that was reserved for Clinton. (Last sentence of quote in post #5.)</p>
<p>Isn’t it funny how the term “visceral hostility” even becomes the phrase du jour… 
</p>
<p>If your question is really about Krugman, I think the man has been suffering a long, slow meltdown for the last few years. He is a smart man, but he sounds bitter and hateful, and not just about Obama–or Bush for that matter. I just usually skip his stuff, now. It’s just rant.</p>
<p>Oops, cross posted with Marite.</p>
<p>“and does not make use of the solid evidence that economists ordinarily (including Krugman) use to make their points.”</p>
<p>Here is one:</p>
<p>The principal policy division between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama involves health care. It’s a division that can seem technical and obscure — and I’ve read many assertions that only the most wonkish care about the fine print of their proposals. </p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Specifically, new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost.</p>
<p>Let’s talk about how the plans compare.</p>
<p>Both plans require that private insurers offer policies to everyone, regardless of medical history. Both also allow people to buy into government-offered insurance instead. </p>
<p>And both plans seek to make insurance affordable to lower-income Americans. The Clinton plan is, however, more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.</p>
<p>But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t. </p>
<p>…</p>
<p>After all, we already have programs that make health insurance free or very cheap to many low-income Americans, without requiring that they sign up. And many of those eligible fail, for whatever reason, to enroll.</p>
<p>An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else. Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.</p>
<p>So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?</p>
<p>To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper. </p>
<p>Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.</p>
<p>That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.</p>
<p>As with any economic analysis, Mr. Gruber’s results are only as good as his model. But they’re consistent with the results of other analyses, such as a 2003 study, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that compared health reform plans and found that mandates made a big difference both to success in covering the uninsured and to cost-effectiveness. </p>
<p>And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.</p>
<p>Now, some might argue that none of this matters, because the legislation presidents actually manage to get enacted often bears little resemblance to their campaign proposals. And there is, indeed, no guarantee that Mrs. Clinton would, if elected, be able to pass anything like her current health care plan.</p>
<p>But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects. </p>
<p>You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care. </p>
<p>If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.</p>
<p>If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/opinion/04krugman.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/opinion/04krugman.html</a></p>
<p>
Krugman is a much meaner version of economist Lester Thurow. Krugman has knowledge of economic principles yet he chooses to ignore them in order to satisfy his personal political agendas. He is a political hack masquerading as an economist.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Paul Krugman has not been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, see:</p>
<p>[Nobel</a> Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences - Wikipedia”>Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I like Krugman, though I don’t always agree with him. But he always makes me think. He is, IMO, particularly knowledgeable about health care.</p>
<p>Simba, the article you’ve quoted from extensively was in the NYT about two weeks ago and clarified for me a major difference between Obama and Clinton. As someone whose major issue is access of health insurance to everyone, that’s the reason I “tipped” toward Clinton.</p>
<p>I don’t think Obama is as sophisticated (read: knowledgeable) about health care as Clinton is.</p>
<p>During the last debate, Clinton stated that the Clinton Health Care plan will cost around $110 Billion.</p>
<p>She has yet to give a comprehensive plan for funding it. She stated (during the debate) that she anticipates a saving of some huge amount ($55 Billion?) through “efficencies” without providing any real specifics. I’m not quite so sure that she is more “knowledgeable” about the funding needed for her plan.</p>
<p>“I don’t think Obama is as sophisticated (read: knowledgeable) about health care as Clinton is.”</p>
<p>She has to be. After the earlier fiasco, she must know about it in great detail.</p>
<p>Both health plans are absurdist. They would both place 40-50 million additional people into a health system that is already dysfunctional for people WITH insurance. And spend $100-$150 billion do it, when the reality is that EVERYONE could be covered, with higher quality care, for what we pay now. (and I can give the figures from my single-payor health insurance as an indicator of the cost and quality differences.)</p>
<p>Of the two, the Clinton health plan is slightly more absurdist.</p>
<p>Krugman was a Nobel Caliber economist. The profession was very sad when he and Larry Summers decided to pursue other interest instead of devoting a lot of time to research.</p>
<p>Krugman doesn’t hate Obama, he just isn’t buying into the razzmatazz of the “Hope for Change” junior senator from Illinois. Unlike so many who have jumped on the bandwagon, Paul Krugman is listening closely to the candidates and has decided that Obama is all talk. I say THANK YOU that not following the masses to the kool-aid. </p>
<p>The Oval Office is not the place for on the job training.</p>
<p>I haven’t been following the Krugman-Obama controversy at all. But the piece Simba quoted from above is unarguable. The Clinton health care plan is a “universal” plan. The Obama health care plan will not, cannot produce “universal” coverage (since it relies on choice and voluntary action, and since for many people choosing not to pay for insurance will be rational).</p>
<p>It is perfectly fair to debate whether “universal” is a good enough thing to justify the costs, both monetary and nonmonetary. But it’s not even subject to question that Obama’s plan is not really an attempt to achieve universal coverage, only to reduce the number of people for whom non-coverage is a rational choice, and otherwise to lower barriers to voluntary coverage.</p>
<p>tega,</p>
<p>I am confused. I thought Krugman taught at Princeton. What does Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, have to do with whether Krugman pursues economic research?</p>
<p>^^^Larry Summers is also an economist. (And, just as an aside, closely related to two Nobel prize winner in economics. Both Samuelson and Arrow are his uncles.)</p>