KRUGMAN: I Just Blew It In My Debate With Joe Scarborough [UPDATE]
As you should know by now, Krugman is arguing for aggressive spending, and a massive de-prioritization of the deficit as an economic concern.
Scarborough is the consummate grand bargaineer, and thinks it's important to do something fast on long-term entitlement spending.
The debate airs tonight, and our Brett Logiurato is covering it LIVE at 11 PM.
But it looks like Krugman whiffed.
In a post titled "Urk" he writes (Via @buzzfeedben):
Well, we’ll see how it comes out after editing, but I feel that I just had my Denver debate moment: I was tired, cranky, and unready for the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff (In 1997 you said that the aging population was a big problem! When Social Security was founded life expectancy was only 62!) Oh, and I wasn’t prepared for Joe Scarborough’s slipperiness about what he actually advocates (he’s for more spending in the near term? Who knew?).
We'll know more soon enough.
UPDATE: Via email, Krugman explains a little bit more about what happened:
Don't know what will make it into the program. But it was many of the usual zombies -- the US could handle debt after WWII only because all our competitors were in ruins, the Social Security age 62 plus the irrelevant 15 to 1 ratio from 1950, and the risk of a bond attack from nowhere -- all the stuff I've dealt with repeatedly on the blog, but wasn't prepared to rebut effectively all over again. Oh, and Charlie raised the damned Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent.