IS HE REALLY AN ECONOMIST? :

The Private Interest (PAUL KRUGMAN, July 26, 2002, NY Times)

[G]eorge W. Bush still wants to party like it's 1999. On Wednesday he insisted that he continued to favor partially privatizing Social Security. [...]

Mr. Bush first proposed privatizing Social Security back when people still believed that stocks only go up. Even then his proposal made no sense; as I've explained before, it was based on the claim that 2-1=4, that you can divert the payroll taxes of younger workers into personal accounts and still pay promised benefits to older workers. But now even the nonsensical promise that individual accounts would earn stock market returns looks pretty unappealing. So why does he keep pushing the idea?

If Mr. Krugman wants to oppose things like the free market on political grounds that's fine, but isn't he supposed to have some negligible comprehension of economics as the premise for his column?
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2002 7:34 AM