KRUGMAN'S DECLINE
Here's a recent Krugman column dismissing the Bush Boom. And a useful retort, with the kind of clear statement of economics to the layman that Krugman used to specialize in before his self-destruction. The two agree that the economy is at full employment, but here is the flip side of the jobless, or at any rate somewhat job-scarce, recovery: productivity is booming.

I would add some complaints about Krugman. His statistics are misleading. So the economy was creating more jobs under Clinton, he points out; well, yeah, but those jobs have already been created, and they're still there. We couldn't keep creating jobs at the rate we did under Clinton because we don't have enough workers. Then growth: "After two and a half years of slow growth under Clinton, in the third quarter of 2003, the economy grew at an annual rate of more than 8 percent." Hmm. The two and a half years of slow growth is false: there was one quarter in there of zooming 5.6% growth; and anyway, slow by whose standards? We were faster than Europe.

Krugman writes as if he has some alternative, as if things were just great when the liberals and Clinton were in power. But the Clinton years were largely characterized by a shift to the right. It is the Democrats who revolted against the Clinton equilibrium first, with Al Gore's people-vs.-the-powerful baloney. Is Paul Krugman a Clinton centrist pretending to be a leftist? Who knows. He is no longer a lucid and honest writer whose views can be discerned. But the message he tries to send-- that left-liberalism is a coherent philosophy of economic governance which will bring prosperity if only we get rid of Bush-- is about as wrong as it can get.