Chucklebait.

In an essay about "the bigotry of low expectations", Paul Krugman frets over government workers, who might see workforce numbers cut (or employees not replaced), with no corresponding reduction in the amount of work to do...

Sharp reductions in the government work force without, as far as anyone can tell, a commensurate reduction in the work to be done?

Whatever will the bureacrats do?

(I'm guessing a generous OT package negotiated by government workers' unions, but just in case that doesn't happen? Surely there are thousands of private sector workers who found themselves in exactly the same pinch in recent years, and yet ... the work gets done. You do more with less.)

Speaking of funny,
the wounded outrage of those who vision themselves champion delegaters, who don't seem quite satisfied with what they've ordered... it really is something, isn't it?

After all, anyone can come up with some good deficit-reduction ideas; I can come up with a dozen even before I’ve had my morning coffee. Brainstorming is easy.

What the commission was supposed to do was something much harder: it was supposed to produce a package that Congress would give an up and down vote. To do this, it would have to produce something much better than a package with some good stuff buried in among the bad stuff; it would have to produce a package good enough to accept as is.

And it didn’t do that. Instead, it produced a package that may have had some good things in it, but also, remarkably, introduced a whole slew of new bad ideas that weren’t even in the debate before.

And finally,
is anybody calculating Paul Krugman's carbon footprint (on behalf of the good of the nation world and all)? He seems to be travelling more than the president lately -- and economics is presumably his area of expertise -- so why no bang for the buck? Burning an awful lot of carbon that future generations will think wasteful, and for what? Is he only able to cricize ("the endtimes are coming!), and whine that since no one took his advice in the first place, we'll get what's coming to us...

Best I can tell,
Krugman is a big fan of the "too big to fail" non-free market. Meaning, when greed is good and some folks overgrab, they necessarily can't keep up the stimulating the economy this way. When they go bust, we've got to force the rest of us to spend, spend, spend, to keep the economy falsely operating at the artificially valued, greed-era hum.

So we had to bail out AIG, instead of letting the free market do it's balancing act and wipe out the savings of all those unsavvy, cushioned investors who bet the farm on one stock (or others.) Nevermind those who never gambled, who never "won" big on stocks and spent the proceeds, content to pay-as-we-went because we feel much more secure not owing more than we have...

If you only let the bettors feel their "wins", and you cushion their losses because if they go down, they take innocent others with them, you've gamed the system. Irreparably.

I'd like to see the Krugman's of the world curtail their travelling, come up with a few bread-and-butter solutions of their own (that don't involve forcing non-players into the rescue game), and finally -- well, you know that gameshow, "Smarter than a Fifth Grader?"

When they lose, contestants go out with a minimal prize offering, but they agree to say, "I'm NOT smarter than a fifth grader."

Spending more than you've got -- whether on the promise of easy credit, faith that your rainy days will be few, or just a smug feeling that no matter personal performance, you'll always be at the top of the heap looking down at lesser others... -- a fifth grader smart with lunch money can tell you that's a no - no.

So please,
all I ask is that just one of these economic engineers --- Greenspan, Summers, Beranake, Krugman, Geithner, any one of them... -- next time you go for the big bailout because the superior players are just "too big to fail", before you go cutting any deals or checks?

Line them up for the cameras, and make them state: "Greed is NOT good, and in the end, it doesn't pay."

Until we get there, I suspect what these men really are doing is just shuffling money from this pocket to that -- robbing Peter to pay off Paul, so to speak -- because truth be told, we're afraid of the raw honesty of the Free Market and prefer to play games that privilege some over others.

Don't look now, but I think the world is on to us...