Quote Of The Day

From Paul Krugman's Friday op-ed in The New York Times, who was writing about the potential financial meltdown in Europe:

Meanwhile, what are the lessons for the rest of us?

The deficit hawks are already trying to appropriate the European crisis, presenting it as an object lesson in the evils of government red ink. What the crisis really demonstrates, however, is the dangers of putting yourself in a policy straitjacket. When they joined the euro, the governments of Greece, Portugal and Spain denied themselves the ability to do some bad things, like printing too much money; but they also denied themselves the ability to respond flexibly to events.

And when crisis strikes, governments need to be able to act. That’s what the architects of the euro forgot — and the rest of us need to remember.

The Euro Trap

The Obama Administration clearly means to tie itself up with useless preconditions for any economic action to stave off the next leg of the recession. They bleat about the debt and the deficit, as if they haven't been blowing money hand over fist both in the two useless wars we're still fighting, and the expansion of the military budget. Yet they just can't seem to find the money to put people back to work, or to fund Medicare. Forget about the manufactured crisis with Social Security.

The irony is that I suspect Krugman will be apologizing for much of this in the coming months. I hope for once he proves me wrong.