Krugman is correct but he's not right! He is brilliant on economics, naive on GOVERNANCE!

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

51. And his anecdote is correct. There should have been a larger stimulus. That's for sure...

And he's also right about his sentiments in today's article that he wrote:

We're in bad times, and that is largely becuase the stimulus has run out. Add to that Republican governors laying off public workers, deliberately keeping the unemployment rate up. The bad news is that Krugman still puts the blame squarely on the president and not on a Congress that he admits is deliberately blocking jobs bills or laying off workers at the state level.

The federal agencies have little money, so there's little in the way that he can do to direct them. (For example, HUD doesn't have much and is often ignored or undervalued as an agency because its mission is to serve low-income famillies.)

This is incredibly frustrating because we're all familiar with the cycle:

1. Republicans in office want to prove the ineffetivelness of government by destroying it from within.
2. Fed up with Republican mess, Americans vote for Democrats.
3. Faced with the issue of having to clean up Republican mess, Democrats are often confronted with difficult issues and have to make unpopular choices. (We're in this stage now.)
4. Impatient and unhappy Americans become disenchanted with the Democrats for having to make unpopular decisions and/or failling to clean up the mess quickly enough. In response, they reelect Republicans (often those same Republicans who created the mess in the first place).

And the cycle starts all over.

This is where we liberals have to use more common sense. The American people have two different standards for the two major political parties. They expect Republicans to play politics and to govern on principle. However, they expect Democrats to *govern* and they also expect Democrats to govern with bipartisanship and compromise in mind. Since the Democratic Party is also a large tent, there is natural discord among the various factions. That is the price we pay for being Democrats. We will seldom speak with one voice but are expected to compromise.

I have always held that if we elect a larger *progressive* majority, we will see the progressive policy outcomes that we want. But even then, we need to exercise a bit of reason here: that progressive change didn't happen overnight. It takes time and it takes patience and hard work. We liberals often cannot except that fact and thus we easily give up and become disillusioned...often apathetic.

We must continue to fight, and we have no choice. The Republicans are kicking our collective ass at the state and local levels. We cannot give up.