Five Minutes With: Paul Krugman

By Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress. Posted November 18, 2005.

[Editor's Note: This interview was originally published on Campus Progress.]

Paul Krugman has been called "the most important political columnist in America" by The Washington Monthly. An economist who has taught at MIT, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, Krugman became a columnist for the New York Times' opinion section in 2000. Since then, he has been an outspoken critic of conservative policies and politics, especially the economic and social missteps of the Bush administration. His 2003 collection of columns, The Great Unraveling, was a New York Times bestseller.

Krugman talked to Campus Progress about illegal immigration, the deficit, blogs and why he'd pick a root canal over Bill O'Reilly.

What prompted you to write your November 4th column "Defending Imperial Nudity"? We were passing it around the office and couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry -- especially when we got to the end.

We finally reached a point where a lot of people are starting to acknowledge the obvious, which is that we were deliberately hyped into war, and a lot of defenses are coming up. People are still trying to pretend that nothing happened and it all made sense, and I felt that it was time to find a way to play how ridiculous that is.

I get the feeling that we're living in a really good political satire.

Yeah, or a really tawdry political novel. If you tried to make this stuff up, nobody would dare - they'd say that it's ridiculous.

You've written economics textbooks before. If you had to imagine writing another textbook 30 years from now characterizing economic policy under various presidents, how would you talk about the Bush administration?

Well, the answer is that there is no policy. What's interesting about it is that there's no sign that anybody's actually thinking about "well, how do we run this economy?" Everything becomes an excuse to do pre-set things instead of an actual response to an event or a real problem. So, the idea was "we're going to cut taxes on capital income, as opposed to earned income" and whatever happened became a reason to do that.

Obviously, you've talked a lot about the deficit. And now we're watching some Republicans on the Hill try to pass a joke of a reconciliation bill. Why aren't people as angry about the deficit issue as they should be?

Well, ultimately any government has to raise enough money to pay for its promises. Right now we have a 21% of GDP federal government and a 17% of GDP revenue base. Ultimately, that doesn't work, particularly because some of the expenses of the government are going to rise. The current administration and the current Congress has shown absolutely no willingness to bring those things in line. When they're talking about big budget cuts, it turns out that they're actually talking about $5-10 billion a year, mostly aimed at poor people - so it creates a lot of hardship without addressing the actual problem. And they keep looking for more tax cuts. At some point, the rug gets pulled out from underneath. The trouble with railing against the deficit is that it's hard to get people completely enraged. They ought to be, because this is world class irresponsibility, and one day it's going to take its toll.

One of the most troubling provisions in the budget reconciliation is HB609, which could cut billions in federal aid for higher education. Seems like this is adding yet another blow by some politicians who do not properly value equal accessibility to education and opportunity.

We have disturbing trends in our society, and instead of doing things to counter them, the current political majority seems to be out to accentuate them, inequality in general. Now, what's happening to the democratization of education that we achieved half a century ago? We seem to be losing it and going back towards some kind of a hereditary, aristocratic model where only the people from the right families get to go to the right schools. Instead of doing something about it, the government is cutting financial aid, which is one of the things that allows kids who don't come from the right families to go to the best schools.

You've spoken before about post-Katrina reconstruction and your dissapointment with conservatives pushing towards a permanent Estate Tax repeal in its immediate wake. Do you see any potential positive opportunities in the reconstruction?

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