OK Krugman didn’t actually say those words, but he did deliver the message.
Great ‘catch’ by WSJ writer James Taranto who hoists economist Paul Krugman by his own pitards …
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Excerpted from WSJ: Mirror, Mirror, By JAMES TARANTO, March 5, 2010
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what the calls “the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties”:
Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
“What Democrats believe,” he says “is what textbook economics says”
But that’s not how Republicans see it.
GOPers say unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”
Krugman scoffs: “To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in their universe.”
What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called “Macroeconomics”:
Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of “Eurosclerosis,” the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.
So it turns out that what Krugman calls Republicans “bizarre point of view” is, in fact, textbook economics.
By the way, the authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.
It seems Krugman himself lives in two different universes — the universe of the academic economist and the universe of the bitter partisan columnist.
The Homa Files 
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