Contra Krugman, episode 188.

Welcome to the podcast that takes apart Paul Kruikman's New York Times column.

Join us as Tom Woods and Bob Murphy teach economics by uncovering and dissecting the arrows of Krugman.

Nobel Prize winner, newspaper columnist, and destroyer of nations.

It's time for Contra Krugman.

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Hey everybody, Tom and Bob here with another episode of Contra Krugman. This one is absolutely on economics.

And it's the kind of column that just works for Contra Krugman. It's talking about economics. It's Krugman,

as Bob would say, running victory laps on behalf of Keynesianism. And here we are to talk about it.

The column in particular is called The Economics of Donald J. Keynes. And the subtitle is

Austerity for Democrats, Stimulus for Republicans, May 6th, 2019, linked at contracruigman.com slash 188.

And the gist of this column is that Republicans are hypocrites, that at a time when we really needed a lot of stimulus spending, and we needed government involvement, we were told this fairy tale about the U.S.

government was facing a debt crisis and what we needed instead was austerity. We needed to cut

back on spending. And Krugman is saying that now these very same Republicans, you know, you don't

hear a peep out of them about it. They want deficits. And he's saying that, yes, Keynes called for deficits,

but in cases where there was high unemployment, and these people who wouldn't go for the

deficits then want them now when we have much lower unemployment. So he says, first of all,

we're seeing that these people are hypocrites. But secondly, what we're seeing is that Keynesianism

is vindicated by the performance of the past few years, because the only driver of the economy really has been government spending and deficits.

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