Dr. Krugman Visits the Dumbdumbs

[F]lirting with crisis is arguably part of the [militant extremist G.O.P.] plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

Dear Dr. Bones,

Has your colleague Krugman ever met a real, live Republicaniac? Or even read their Party-an’-Ideology agitprop with the same level of attention he would grant some technical paper on a fine point of academic mammonology?

I cannot tell from that paragraraph, or from the whole scribble, whether P.K. supposes that there ever existed a Plan VooDoo, let alone whether he supposes the VooDoo Plansters are carryin’ on with their VD even as we speak.

Obviously (to normal persons, but not to Krugman) if VD was a "cover story," than the genuine Grand Old Plan must have been something else, something daylight-shy that one would have to rip the VD camouflage off in order to detect and deplore. He does think the G.O.P. geniuses are still hidin’ their ¡Smash Social Security! [1] attitudes, which is inaccurate only insofar as there has long ceased to be any serious attempt at concealment.







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[1] Like PK, I single out State pensions as especially obnoxious to the slashin’ and smashin’ gentry. Presumably he, like me, understands that what lurks under the Party-an’-Ideology cover story is far broader than that, that the militant extremists really mean somethin’ more like ¡Abajo los entitulamentos! ¡Que comen el pastel!

(( Not altogether relevant, but definitely of interest is that there seems to be no established term in Undocumentol corresponding to ‘entitlement(s)’. I expected that *entitulomento(s) or something close would be all over the place, but not so. The Portugals do have entitulamientos, but not so many of them that they use the word often.

(( The G@@GLE Gibberish Machine cranks out simply derechos, which obviously will not do at all: Uncle Scrooge and Daddy Warbucks certainly think creditors have a derecho to be repaid, they’d die at the barricades spreadsheet in hand for that proposition. Nevertheless, although one may say idiomatically in Greater Texan "Freelord Shylock is entitled to payment in full as originally covenanted for," should we start calling every secret-sector indebtedness "an entitlement" on the lender's side, what we really mean by the E-word would disappear in a vast cloud of irrelevant chaff. ))