Paul Krugman is no stranger to going on teevee and encountering, well, people of an addled aspect -- he's done "Squawk Box", after all! But there was something very special about one of his most recent appearances on MSNBC. You thought that Felix Baumgartner dude who fell to earth for Red Bull was extreme? Take a seat, balloon boy. Paul Krugman has become the first human I've ever witnessed escaping from the gravitational pull of something with black hole-like density: Joe Scarborough and his gang of deficit hacks.
Krugman has this interesting thesis about the way "thinking" congeals among media elites. He thinks that they are overly obsessed with a deficit crisis that is decades from happening, if it happens at all. He observes that in this time of widespread unemployment and grievous economic dislocation -- a continuing condition of the lightly tended to 2008 economic calamity -- and against all evidence, the media elites have become convinced that the long-term budget deficit is the actual crisis that's emerged in America, to claim its future. And then you get a cycle -- blather, wince, repeat -- in which all of these cosseted simps reinforce one another until this bizarre line of thinking is deeply entrenched and inalterable.
It's an old yarn, and Krugman's far from the first person to notice. Greg Sargent calls it the "Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop," and as the National Journal reported back in May of 2011, it's been unfolding within the media and distorting its coverage -- mostly to the expense of the more serious unemployment crisis. (There is no comparable feedback loop on the unemployment crisis. Aside from occasionally speculating on how high unemployment rates could affect the electoral hopes of prominent political celebrities seeking re-election, it's almost never discussed.)
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