To: Doc Bones who wrote (1283 ) 2/5/2002 10:52:53 AM From: Zoltan! Respond to KRUGMAN UPS THE ANTE: Today’s column from Paul Krugman makes Paul Begala look positively non-partisan. There’s first a strained attempt at the most ambitious-yet Enron analogy. Krugman charges that “on the basis of surplus fantasies, the administration — aided by an audit committee, otherwise known as the U.S. Congress, that failed to exercise due diligence — gave itself a big bonus in the form of a huge tax cut.” Ergo, Congress is Arthur Andersen. Ergo, Bush is Enron. Q.E.D. But wait a minute. For this analogy to even begin to work, wouldn’t the tax cut have to have been applied only to the members of the administration? And wouldn’t the Congress, including many Democrats, have to have been complicit in that? And wouldn’t the tax-payers, like Enron’s shareholders, have been fleeced rather than reimbursed? You have to wonder if Krugman has so bought his own demagoguery that for a split second he almost believed that. Or is he just equating Ken Lay and George W. Bush anyhow, anyway, by any rhetorical means? Then there’s the extraordinary argument that the Bush administration has cynically used the tragedy of September 11 to add to its budget a “one-time charge” – an “accounting trick” worthy of Enron’s crooks. That “one-time charge,” you see, is the new defense budget! It’s a phony new charge, in Krugman's view, made purely to cook the books to distract attention from Ken Lay-style embezzlement by the president. Think of that for a minute. Krugman is asserting that the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of last fall was not designed actually to protect us from danger or to defeat a real threat – but in order to preserve their malevolent fiscal agenda, aimed at their own enrichment. Our current war is therefore nothing less than a conscious, cynical attempt by Bush to rob the American tax-payer in order to shovel money at corporate defense contractors and the rich, regardless of the country’s military, fiscal or economic needs. I guess at least we now know what Krugman really thinks. He and Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky seem to have a huge amount now in common.andrewsullivan.com
