New Tork Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning Economist, Paul Krugman was a guest on This Week with Christiane Amanpour participating in a rountable discussion with Jared Bernstein, Doug Holtz-Eakin, and Carol Lee on jobs. Sounds like Dr. Krugman had a lousy morning.
Boy, that was a morning of the undead.
First, we had DeMint assuring us that businessmen he talks to say that fear of regulation – and the National Labor Relations Board!- is holding them back.
Then Douglas Holtz-Eakin repeated the claim, and also did the “we’re about to be Greece” thing after a week in which the 10-year Treasury fell to 2 percent.
OK, that’s what happens with zombie ideas- no matter how often you kill them, they keep coming back. But don’t these people ever get embarrassed?
Dr. Krugman links to an article in McClatchy that debunks the argument that regulations, taxes are killing small business, the owners say they aren’t:
WASHINGTON – Politicians and business groups often blame excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes for tepid hiring in the economy. However, little evidence of that emerged when McClatchy canvassed a random sample of small business owners across the nation.
snip
McClatchy reached out to owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they indeed were being choked by regulation, whether uncertainty over taxes affected their hiring plans and whether the health care overhaul was helping or hurting their business.
Their response was surprising.
None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.
Umm. Yes, he’s right these people are zombies. You can’t kill them or their lies.
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