So much for New Year resolutions. Liberal economic columnist Paul Krugman's policy prescriptions haven't changed.
In his latest column [1], printed in the Jan. 3 New York Times, Krugman continued to advocate New Deal-era solutions to bring down the unemployment rate which will continue to be extremely high even if an economic boom (of 4 percent GDP growth per year) were to take place.
"Seriously, what we're looking at over the next few years, even with pretty good growth, are unemployment rates that not long ago would have been considered catastrophic - because they are. Behind those dry statistics lies a vast landscape of suffering and broken dreams. And the arithmetic says that the suffering will continue as far as the eye can see," he wrote.
Krugman was right to be concerned about the still high unemployment rate, but his left-wing government spending solution has yet to fix the problem.
"So what can be done to accelerate this all-too-slow process of healing? A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration - we'd be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure," Krugman wrote.
But the columnist and Nobel Prize winner has held this position for years. In fact, on Nov. 10, 2008, just after Barack Obama won the presidential election, Krugman wrote a column entitled: "Franklin Delano Obama [2]?" arguing that Obama 'should learn from F.D.R's failures.' One of those failures according to Krugman, was that F.D.R.'s "economic policies were too cautious." [3]