Paul Krugman Compilation: His Decade of Being a Failure

Yesterday I wrote about an imbecilic comment that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote on Google+: that a massive earthquake on the East Coast would spur economic growth.  If you need a refresher, this is what the comment looked like:

I did some digging this morning to find other idiotic advice that Krugman had given concerning the economy.  Preferably, I was looking for material that came from at least several years ago so that I would know whether Krugman's advice proved to be sound or awful.

Quite frankly, I already knew that anything that I found that Krugman wrote would be wrong, so really I was just looking for something stupid that he undoubtedly had said.  I found it and a lot of it.

In the very first piece I found, one of the article's first paragraphs starts thusly:

But predictions of an imminent recovery in business investment keep turning out to be premature. Most businesses are in no hurry to go on another spending spree. And those that might have started to invest again have been deterred by sliding stock prices...

Is Krugman talking about the Obama economy?  No, he's talking about President Bush's economy in 2002.  Krugman takes delight in raining on the economy's parade, predicting that a double dip was imminent.  In fact, the article is entitled "Dubya's Double Dip?"

Compare that to Krugman's unbelievably wrong prediction, made in 2009, that President Obama's stimulus will cause unemployment to dip to 7.6% by the beginning of 2011:

By my calculations, the Obama plan is supposed to reduce average unemployment over the next two years from 8.7% to 7.6%.

But back to "Dubya's Double Dip?"  What is one of Krugman's suggestions on how to help the economy? Why, creating a housing bubble, of course!  Read in horror:

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

So guess what: the United States got a housing bubble.  And it burst.  And we still haven't recovered.  Housing sales are down, people are being evicted and foreclosed upon in record numbers, and Paul Krugman is laughing to himself that he said we needed a housing bubble.

And, big shock, five years later he slams President Bush for creating a housing bubble, saying that it could be the worst housing slump in seventy years:

That is, the bubbles in the most bubbleicious areas were bigger than anything we’ve ever seen — and there’s every reason to think that the required fall in prices in those areas will be much bigger than anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression.

And then, as scum-baggy as ever, he then mocks Alan Greenspan saying that only fools would create housing bubbles:

All that wisdom about an “accident waiting to happen” — an accident for which he, of course, bears no responsibility.

Remember, this is the guy who brushed off Edward Gramlich when he warned about subprime problems; who “frequently argued there could be no housing bubble.”

The chutzpah is breathtaking.

Look, I know that Paul Krugman is a liberal.  But dear God, even liberals have to see that this man has been wrong about practically everything important that he predicted in the last ten years.  Housing?  Incredibly wrong.  Unemployment?  Disastrously wrong.  Bubble?  Preposterously wrong.

The time's come to simply ignore the crazed rambling of a man that may not have been right about one thing in his entire life.

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