The Professor Takes the Gloves Off

Accustomed in economic circles to calling a stupid argument a stupid argument, and isolated (in Princeton, New Jersey) from the Washington dinner-party circuit, Paul Krugman has become the most prominent voice in the mainstream U.S. media to openly and repeatedly accuse George Bush of lying to the American people to sell budget-busting tax cuts and a pre-emptive and nearly unilateral war.

Krugman cannot be dismissed by opponents as some dyed-in-the-wool lefty. He's a moderate academic economist who's been radicalized by the Bush White House and the right wing it represents. Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the op-ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His new book, "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century" (#9 on the New York Times best-seller list and a top seller on Amazon) is a collection of his op-ed pieces from January 2000-January 2003.

McNally: How did your role in the op-ed pages of The New York Times happen and how has it evolved?

Krugman: I was brought on to write about "my real home," economics and business, specifically international economics. There were a lot of international crises in the '90s and The Times thought I'd be writing about policies and disasters overseas, as well as about stuff at home, typically the follies of the new economy. But it was election season, and it pretty quickly became clear to me -- and more and more so as we went along -- that the really scary follies, the potential disasters that were the greatest risks of concern were at home.

I came on thinking it would be a largely non-political column. I think The Times thought that, too. And then during the campaign, because I knew my stuff -- basically, because I could do my own arithmetic -- I found myself saying: "You know, these guys are lying...This is a fundamentally irresponsible and dishonest economic program." Then after the election it increasingly became clear to me that it wasn't just economics.

So it's a very strange thing. I'm no wild-eyed radical. Actually, The American Prospect, a very liberal magazine, ran a story in the mid-90s attacking me for my support of Free Trade.

McNally: I remember that.

Krugman: So I was kind of a bad guy from the point of view of more consistently reliable commentators on the left. But of course now all of that seems insignificant compared with the awesomeness of the fraud that they [the Bush Administration] are trying to perpetrate on all of us.

McNally: Exactly. Could talk a little bit about the introduction to your book and the context it sets? I assume you would never have written that at the time you wrote the first op-eds that appear in the book.

Krugman: You're right. I put a date on the introduction: April 10, just to make it clear that this is what I thought at that date. If we'd found a nuclear program in Iraq or the budget picture had improved, then I would've looked like I didn't know what I was talking about. But of course everything has turned out even worse than I expected. What I realized looking back over my own writings is that it's pretty easy to identify some very radical intents on the part of the coalition that now runs the country. It's not just a single group. It's the religious right, it's the hard-line conservatives, it's the anti-environmental industry groups and so on.

Put it all together and what you see is the outlines of an extremely radical program. Maybe reactionary would be the word because a lot of it would be rolling us back to where we were before the 1930s, before Franklin Roosevelt. In any case, a very radical program that would un-do the America that we've all grown up in.

I end up quoting Henry Kissinger because his writings gave me the key to why it's so hard for people -- even liberals -- to accept what's going on. He wrote about how when faced with a revolutionary power -- who really doesn't accept the rules of the game, the legitimacy of the system -- people who have been accustomed to the stability make excuses. They say: "Oh, well, they may talk that way but they don't really mean it. If we give them some partial concessions we can appease them, they'll be satisfied and all of this stuff would stop." That's exactly what's been happening now.