So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills. Some European countries have it even worse: 21 percent of Spanish workers are unemployed.

Nor is the situation showing rapid improvement. This is a continuing tragedy, and in a rational world bringing an end to this tragedy would be our top economic priority.

Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs. Instead of a determination to do something about the ongoing suffering and economic waste, one sees a proliferation of excuses for inaction, garbed in the language of wisdom and responsibility.

So someone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is neither wise nor responsible. It is, instead, a grotesque abdication of responsibility.

What kinds of excuses am I talking about? Well, consider last week’s release of the latest report on the economic outlook by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D. The O.E.C.D. is basically an intergovernmental think tank; while it has no direct ability to set policy, what it says reflects the conventional wisdom of Europe’s policy elite.

So what did the O.E.C.D. have to say about high unemployment in its member countries? “The room for macroeconomic policies to address these complex challenges is largely exhausted,” declared the organization’s secretary general, who called on countries instead to “go structural” — that is, to focus on long-run reforms that would have little impact on the current employment situation.

And how do we know that there’s no room for policies to put the unemployed back to work? The secretary general didn’t say — and the report itself never even suggests possible solutions to the employment crisis. All it does is highlight the risks, as it sees them, of any departure from orthodox policy.

But then, who is talking seriously about job creation these days? Not the Republican Party, unless you count its ritual calls for tax cuts and deregulation. Not the Obama administration, which more or less dropped the subject a year and a half ago.

The fact that nobody in power is talking about jobs does not mean, however, that nothing could be done.

Bear in mind that the unemployed aren’t jobless because they don’t want to work, or because they lack the necessary skills. There’s nothing wrong with our workers — remember, just four years ago the unemployment rate was below 5 percent.

The core of our economic problem is, instead, the debt — mainly mortgage debt — that households ran up during the bubble years of the last decade. Now that the bubble has burst, that debt is acting as a persistent drag on the economy, preventing any real recovery in employment. And once you realize that the overhang of private debt is the problem, you realize that there are a number of things that could be done about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30krugman.html?_r=1&src=tp&pagewanted=print

see toon at top...

High unemployment numbers may be good for Republicans in the next election, which makes it disturbing that Republican leaders have blocked any discussion of stimulus policies that might succeed in putting people back to work.

In fact, all job-creating proposals that involve spending money are considered verboten among both parties, because Republicans have cowed Democrats with the argument that the 2009 stimulus bill was an irredeemable failure and the deficit is causing unemployment.

If Republicans are as deeply concerned about the 13.9 million out-of-work people as they claim to be, they might have offered ideas of their own that have some possibility of creating jobs. Instead, they have been chanting the same tired and discredited mantras the party has offered since the 1980s: huge tax cuts, huge cuts in safety-net spending, the clear-cutting of regulations, and the inevitable balanced-budget amendment.

The latest example is the chimerical economic plan put forward on Tuesday by Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, who at least until this speech was considered one of the more reasonable of the suitors for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Pawlenty went much further right in proposing to slash government than even the House Republicans or most of the other candidates. The danger is that the race becomes a Bunyan-esque contest between tax cutters, with the public lulled by the false belief that the current tax rates (already low) are somehow inhibiting hiring.

Mr. Pawlenty proposed getting rid of the capital gains tax — not cutting it, like Republicans of yore. He would also eliminate the taxes on interest, dividends, and inheritance. Though businesses are flush with cash, he would more than halve their taxes, and cut the top individual rate to 25 percent. This would magically “unleash the creative energy of America’s businesses, families and individuals,” he said, promising a booming job market and a decade of 5 percent yearly growth.

That is a preposterous target number, beyond the imagination of economists who can barely envision 3 percent growth. It is particularly unimaginable because of the giant deficits the vanishing tax money would create, as the ripples from blown-up government programs washed through state and city economies. Mr. Pawlenty predicts that the growth from lower taxes would wipe out the deficit, an idea discredited since the Reagan years.

The shallowness of his ideas is best illustrated by a proposal to cut government services by finding similar private enterprises on Google. Private security firms advertise on the Internet, so can we shutter the Pentagon? That would save a lot of money right there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12sun2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

see toon at top.

----------------------