11 People That Joe Scarborough Should Meet Before Writing Another Column On The Deficit
MSNBC host and POLITICO columnist Joe Scarborough has a piece up today titled Paul Krugman vs. The World. It's about Paul Krugman's ostensibly contrarian views on the deficit and the national debt.
Here's how it's teased on the POLITICO homepage.
The article says: Paul Krugman favors running deeper deficits, but folks like the chief of the Council on Foreign Relations, Erskine Bowles, Scarborough himself, Mika Brzezinski, Steven Rattner, and former Joint Chief chairman Michael Mullen all disagree with Krugman.
Note that zero of the above people are "economists" let alone mainstream economists.
But actually there are plenty of economists and economically-literate minds who think that, to varying degrees, the deficit is not what we should be worrying about.
For Joe Scarborough's sake, here's a list of people. With each we've linked to comments they've made about their (lack of) worry about the deficit.
- Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius
- Nomura economist Richard Koo
- Brad Delong
- Alan Blinder
- Martin Wolf
- Larry Summers
- James Galbraith
- Robert Reich
- Bruce Bartlett
- John Makin (a conservative AEI scholar with a new paper out today on the danger of overhyping deficit fears!)
- Rep. Jerry Nadler (not an economist, but as knowledgeable on economics as anyone up on Scarborough's list).
Anyway, that was just a partial list, but one that covers conservatives, liberals, Wall Street economists, and former government officials.
Note that several of them, including Paul Krugman himself, do acknowledge long-term issues arising from health care costs, so even the idea that Krugman wants to do nothing is a falsehood.
The issue is not as one-sided as Scarborough believes.
SEE ALSO: Richard Koo: Why we shouldn't even be talking about the long-term deficit >