On Sunday Paul Krugman wrote some more delusional jive about inflation. Krugman tells readers that inflation is not happening, and that the rise in commodity prices is a function of developing nations demanding more commodities to feed and power their countries. That may be partly true, but that doesn’t explain the increases in prices for financial assets or gold. Last I checked Chinese farmers weren’t pouring liquid gold into their scooter’s gas tank.
Krugman also says that the Fed isn’t printing money, even though Ben Bernanke himself has said that, in fact, is exactly what the Fed is doing, and plan on doing. Krugman then goes on to distract readers with the fact that commodity prices are set internationally, so by Krugman’s logic, Fed money printing couldn’t have any effect on them. But he doesn’t tell readers that international commodity prices are set in U.S. dollars, the value of which the Fed has a major effect on. The effects of the Fed’s easy money program can be seen in the price of gold in various currencies in E.J. Smith’s, The Record High Price of Gold: A Currency Story.
It isn’t just Krugman trying to change the facts. Other liberals like him are constantly attempting to bend reality in ways that benefit themselves personally. Krugman for his part loves to play the liberal advocate as a Nobel Prize winning economist. Somehow Krugman’s expertise extends to climate change, and a multitude of subjects on which he opines in the New York Times. But throughout his liberalism leads the ways, as does Bernie Sanders’, the self-proclaimed socialist senator from Vermont.
Sanders has taken to giving eight hour speeches on the Senate floor to demand that the rich be taxed more, much more. He wants confiscatory taxation to level the playing field and can’t imagine that lower taxes for the rich may somehow create incentives to invest and thereby employ the poor and improve their lives. No, for Sanders it’s a black and white world in which the wealthy are out to get the poor for every penny. What a load of crap. Sanders has apparently bent time and exists only in the late 19th century. As Deroy Murdock writes at the National Review:
Americans who earned at least $200,000 filed 3,912,225 tax returns or 9.96 percent of that year’s 39,250,369 total returns. This group deducted $72,336,640,000 in charity, or 41.83 percent of the $172,936,002,000 for such deductions that all filers claimed. In short, the top 10 percent of taxpayers paid 42 percent of all charitable deductions, worth $72 billion in 2008 alone.
Does that sound like a group of robber barons to you? Me either.
