By Joe Weisenthal
Paul Krugman and Joe Scarborough went mano-a-mano in a taped debate with Charlie Rose earlier on deficits and spending.
As you should know by now, Krugman is arguing for aggressive
spending, and a massive de-prioritization of the deficit as an economic
concern.
Scarborough is the consummate grand bargaineer, and thinks it's
important to do something fast on long-term entitlement spending.
The debate airs tonight, and our Brett Logiurato is covering it LIVE at 11 PM.
But it looks like Krugman whiffed.
"Well, we’ll see how it comes out after
editing, but I feel that I just had my Denver debate moment: I was
tired, cranky, and unready for the blizzard of misleading factoids and
diversionary stuff (In 1997 you said that the aging population was a big
problem! When Social Security was founded life expectancy was only 62!)
Oh, and I wasn’t prepared for Joe Scarborough’s slipperiness about what
he actually advocates (he’s for more spending in the near term? Who
knew?)."
We'll know more soon enough.
UPDATE: Via email, Krugman explains a little bit more about what happened:
"Don't know what will make it into the
program. But it was many of the usual zombies -- the US could handle
debt after WWII only because all our competitors were in ruins, the
Social Security age 62 plus the irrelevant 15 to 1 ratio from 1950, and
the risk of a bond attack from nowhere -- all the stuff I've dealt with
repeatedly on the blog, but wasn't prepared to rebut effectively all
over again. Oh, and Charlie raised the damned Reinhart-Rogoff 90
percent."
SoRo: Pass the popcorn!
http://tinyurl.com/c83p63e
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