Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman

Newly emboldened President Obama is calling for a significant increase in spending in his new 10-year budget, finally reversing years of harsh and ill-advised spending cuts that likely deepened and prolonged the recession. Paul Krugman applauds this move in the right direction in Monday’s column, writing, “Maybe Washington is starting to get over its narrow-minded, irresponsible obsession with long-run problems and will finally take on the hard issue of short-run gratification instead.”

He’s being flip, he admits, but his subject really is why the obsession with long-term deficits has, in fact, been the real cop out in recent years.  It has provided an excuse not to deal with the country’s pressing problems of rising inequality, decaying infrastructure and punishing labor market. And it has probably damaged both the short and long run.

“Think about it,” Krugman says, “Faced with mass unemployment and the enormous waste it entails, for years the Beltway elite devoted almost all their energy not to promoting recovery, but to Bowles-Simpsonism — to devising “grand […]