Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22krugman.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0727-L17
I’ll pull out two comments:
In particular, cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of weak consumer demand.
What we need to read here is “cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of considerable uncertainty with regard to our regulatory future, our tax future, and our overall economic conditions that are resulting from that uncertainty.” Reading fools like Krugman, you would think people were banging on the doors of Colonel Sanders, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison to DEMAND the products that made them rich. This is stupidity of a depth possible only for someone who has never run a business, or had a real job. Krugman doesn’t even seem to have had the high school job at Burger King.
For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great.
I do know my 1930’s history, and what happened is the Fed inflated our currency in the late 1920’s, the DEFLATED it very consciously, beginning just before the Crash it more or less caused, and continuing roughly through the first year of FDR’s tenure. No one is calling on the Fed to pursue deflationary policy, and cutting government spending does not constitute deflation by any rational definition.
The naked fact is that we will be paying some $1 trillion JUST IN INTEREST a decade from now, which will constitute what was as of a couple decades ago our ENTIRE BUDGET, and as of a tad over ten years ago HALF our budget.
These leftists are so stupid they assume that businesspeople are unaware that at some point tax increases will be necessary. They are planned for 2013 already, and amount to something on the order of a 30% hike. By 2016 the plan is to collect $3 Trillion in taxes annually (and self evidently spend much more than that).
None of this is complicated. Taxes deferred are not taxes avoided. In fact, the longer it takes to pay them–as with any debt–the higher the eventual cost. This basic phenomena is familiar to anyone running a business or a household, and will in my view not be lost on the bulk of voters next year, Krugman’s avid propagandizing notwithstanding.