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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (114114)	6/28/2009 7:51:30 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 543020

. . .Krugmans arguments were spot on and delivered very well. Glad you found them helpful. I just barely caught the end of that conversation. However, I did catch Krugman debating John Taylor of Stanford on Fareed Zakaria's GPS program on the stimulus, healthcare, state of the economy. The contrast was fascinating. Taylor is your classic dapper intellectual--speaks with authority, makes sentences that sound authoritative, always cool, body moves zip, you get the picture. Krugman is, of course, Krugman. Lots of twitches, eye rolls, incomplete sentences, sort of whinny voice, you get the picture. Taylor took the classic positions: worry, worry worry about inflation, too big a deficit becoming catastrophic, interest rates going up because of worry about the deficit. Healthcare proposals are too expensive. Public option means loss of private competition which means prices will go up because nothing the government ever does is less expensive, more efficient, than private business. And so on. You start thinking Taylor is the authority and Krugman is sort of chipping in with negatives. Then you notice that Taylor offers authoritative broad generalizations; Krugman offers detail after quick detail after quick detail that says Taylor really is winging it. By the end, Zakaria was simply asking Krugman for information and making certain that he was graceful with Taylor. Terrifically interesting.