I don’t know where Krugman gets his estimates but it’s hard to imagine a million extra jobs already having been generated from a stimulus program that’s spent less than 10% of its funds.  And even if true, we’re talking a scant .3% affect on the employment rate.  So, this arguable benefit for a ballooned deficit that will certainly start haunting as the ghost of stimulus past.  How was this a good thing?

hello. hey doc, this govt. stimulus fraud has disappeared. you cannot tell me where it has helped. you cannot tell me that our economy is the same agrarian based economy of the 1930s that was devastated by a dust-bowl. you cannot tell me we would have gone into a depression. no business was too big to fail. our regulations in place are corrupted with cronyism in office. printing money not worth the paper it is printed on is bringing massive inflation. nothing has helped, the administration only managed to steal more ‘other peoples’ monies’; and grow govt. i million more jobs lost may have been an opening to hire 2 million employees from the phoenix. lower taxes,and no spending on a persistent overseas war: would have been a better course.

All I see are lots of people who either didn’t READ the Krugman article, or flat-out didn’t understand it.

I don’t know if Krugman won a Pulitzer, but what he DID win was the Nobel Prize for Economics…which says he probably understands more about the economy than any of the posters here, whose understanding rivals “Joe The Plumber”‘s.

Krugman didn’t declare “victory”. He said that for all the screw-ups, failures and mismanagement, the stimulus STILL helped and kept us from crashing into a full-blown 1930’s depression.

He also, quite clearly, was cut OUT of the insiders advising the President on economics.  Clearly Larry Summers is challenged by the brilliance of effective scholars of the field like Krugman and Paul Volcker—who ALSO was cut out by Summers’ jealousy.

What Krugman is saying is things are still bad but would have been far worse and THAT is a positive sign in and of itself.

BITTE(R)?

Obama’s crowd didn’t offer you a job. For some godforsaken reason they gave the jobs to Summers and to Geithner - for more of the same for Wall Street. More bubbles. More fraudulent bailouts. ie a sellout to Wall Street interests. At the expense of the US taxpayer. And now you are giving those two scumbags credit??? Something is very wrong.

Should we consider Summers and Geithner as Palestinians forced to walk through the financial minefield the Neocons laid, in front of Israel’s tanks? In the case of Summers and Geithner, the progressives will be delighted, _delighted_, if they both get blown to smithereens by their own unexploded ordnance.

Karma, Baby. Beautiful. Meanwhile you and we can criticize from the sidelines. But praise? Yeuch.

1. What was prevented was not a depression but a crash; had the world’s financial system been allowed to ‘blow-up’ as it appeared to be about to do so in September 2008.

Yes, almost anything is better than that.

2. The depression has not been averted. Printing money in vast quantities may have delayed its arrival but guaranteed its savageness, depth and length.

We remain in the position of the man falling off the Empire State. As he passes the sixtieth floor a someone shouts “How’s it going.” “Great” he replies. As he passes the fiftieth floor a someone else shouts “How’s it going.” “Fine. So far,” he replies. It’s not the falling that hurts ...

We still have the Credit Card debt collapse, the Commerial Property collapse, the Credit Derivative Swaps (CDS) collapse to go ... ymmv. See Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb, Paul Krugman, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber—all available on youtube—for details.

Peter Dale Scott. - http://www.peterdalescott.net/rec.html

I think Krugman is way off on this. Read this economists analysist of things and see of it is correct and we are on the brink of total failure because the real numbers that count are down very low.

See here; http//www.truthout.org/080909A?n and see if Krugman is just being a cheerleader for a fake cause. He is too much in the mainstream of liars and fools who read the tea leaves instead of whether the water in the creek is rising. There is a flood coming and they aren’t doing anything to stop it. Pleasant words will not top it from happening. It isn’t over yet, just delayed.

Usually, I can agree with Mr. Krugman, but not this time. Because I tend to think that Wall Street is a perfect reverse barometer for main street. When they are doing good, things get worse for us.

That after fleecing the public of about 200 billion dollars, paying millions in bonuses to their staff who caused this mess, and failing to really help people avoid the loss of their homes, we are now good to go forward? It’s just a delusion.

Get a grip Paul,commercial real estate is going south and theres another round of ARM resets going under at a rate of 50% with a larger pool of mortgages than the last one, not to mention the Chinese unwinding themselves from buying our debt.

Then there is the American people being squeezed, and taxed, and gutted from every direction. No we’re collapsing, soon we’ll have burned through the billions again, and it will be deja vu all over again.

I like paul Krugman, To me he is just another tool in my box of political “experts”, the people I listen to in the journey to expand my knowledge and TRY to make better opinions of my own. Pulitzer Schmulitzer he is just another smart guy with an opinion (mostly his own?!?)Discourse breeds thought and thought helps create actions….

Obama was lambasted for inventing baseless “jobs saved” numbers attributed to a stimulus that had barely even kicked in, but we’re supposed to believe Krugman can do the same things based on the same data?  Krugman is simply an Obama cheerleader and become more of an ideologue than an economist.

Krugman is so full of shit! Of all the things the government could have done, they picked the absolute worst. And we still have financial institutions which pose a possible “systemic risk”. And the government has yet to implement any regulation to prevent this from happening again. So guess what, it will happen again. Somebody needs to shove a telephone pole up Krugman’s ass.

Paul Krugman: Big Government Prevented created a Second Depression

Thom Hartmann is talking about how the big PHARMA and big insurance, big media, specifically, the Washington Posts mounted an attack on a single payer plan. 
I am for big government investment in the general well being of its citizenry, not an emptying of the vaults of the Treasury for these people, though.
We’re not back on track.  We’re in for more double-talk and just plain bul-shit.  Lately, I have been expecting it from Krugman.  He’s starting to sound like a real dupe.
Wait till the health insurance bills for 2010 come out.  They’ll hail the reform brought about by the Obama dream and get together for a photo op.
When the new rates come out, though, everyone, and I mean everyone, will be paying more.
Just when one gets used to being a slave, the master class gets a hair across their collective asses and make it more unreasonable. 
This time they’re relying on the opiate of the internet and advertisement.