Paul Krugman is a man I admire.
Dan Mitchell isn’t.
I’ve never met Krugman. I have met Mitchell and let’s be as polite as I can: he’s utterly disingenuous, in my opinion.
It was good to see Krugman agrees with me in his latest column in the New York Times. As he said of Mitchell:
Via Ezra Klein, I see that the latest thing on the right is to compare the economic recovery from the 1981-2 recession with our current state and claim that it proves the superiority of conservative economic policies.
This shows why I can’t maintain the pretense that we’re having any kind of intelligent, or remotely honest, discussion.
He was, of course, referring to Mitchell when he said that.
And as he concluded:
Is Dan Mitchell unaware of all that? My guess is not — he knows, but he hopes you don’t. There’s a lot of that going around.
That’s about as close as he can get to saying he thinks Mitchell isn’t telling the truth as I suspect he can go. It’s close enough.
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Well said Richard. That’s the problem with the whole hard-right think tank apparatus in the US (and also equivalent places in the UK like the Institute of Economic Affairs) – they’ll do whatever’s necessary to promote their agenda and it doesn’t matter how far they distort the truth.
There is a very good critique of the whole US right-wing think-tank apparatus in Paul Krugman’s book The Conscience of a Liberal. Nowadays it’s possible to have an entire career shuttling between Republican administrations and the think tank sector, which gives all these guys jobs when the Democrats get in. The whole thing is a huge racket funded by big US corporates.