Paul Krugman



Greetings…it's your favorite dead-itorial writer, Paul "Bearer" Krugman, here to talk to you again about some rather, shall we say, chilling developments in the national economy. Ah, yes, it is a very dark and stormy night indeed for our financial system, dear readers, the kind of night that sends shivers up one's spine and sends the national unemployment rate soaring to nearly 10 percent. So curl up under your covers, and keep the candlelight close, because I will now tell a tale of economic woe so terrifying it may just make your hair stand on end.


Remember when the economy was BOO-ming? When predatory lenders were sucking the blood of homeowners and confidence in the market was ghoulishly high? Little did we know about the creeping, malevolent spirit of fiduciary calamity that lurked in the dark shadows, ready to pop out and gut the $230 billion federal surplus reported by the Congressional Budget Office for fiscal year 2000. What poor, damned fools we were over the next decade to let our national balance sheet slip so far into the deep, bloody red! Now it seems our economy has been buried alive, and the day may never come when it will once again rise from the dead.

Or should I say rise from the debt?

Sometimes I lie awake in bed having frightful nightmares about the demons and monsters that creep and crawl through Wall Street. Even holy water can't ward off these depraved madmen, I'm afraid. I ask you, how long must the American people pay for the spooktacular failures of the Bush administration? Until we find a way to wrest power away from the top 1 percent favored by the Bush-era tax cuts, I'm afraid we may be headed for a grave calamity that would make John Maynard Keynes himself spin in his coffin…


Once the witching hour comes for the U.S. economy, beware! Who knows what sort of evil forces might go bump in the night. (And by "night," I am referring to what most economists predict will either be a double-dip recession or what I would characterize as a "lesser depression," defined as a prolonged period of high unemployment and economic stagnation following the initial recession—less dire perhaps than the depression of the 1930s but still, I would argue, bloodcurdlingly frightening!)

Am I scaring you, readers? Am I chilling you to the bone with my tales of the supernaturally minimal government spending initiatives engineered to remedy decreased revenues both domestically and abroad?


If we're ever to have a ghost of a chance for recovery, the federal government will have to invest heavily in the economy again, and the American people will have to be reassured they won't be R.I.P.-ped off again. Obama may have cobbled his Frankenstein's monster of a jobs plan together from spare parts, but it is nevertheless monstrously important that a bill like this passes.

But don't take my word for it. After all, I am just one lone voice in the darkness. In fact, perhaps none of this is real. Perhaps it's all just a bad dream. A very, very bad dream, indeed. That is…you hope. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!


Sweet dreams, readers…