Krugman In Review

Salon - Why the N.Y. Times ruins Bush's breakfast

Columnist Paul Krugman is W's worst nightmare -- a brilliant economist who meticulously exposes the White House's rigged numbers and lies.

During the 2000 election, the economist took pains to explain the bogus math behind Bush's Social Security privatization plan; after the election, he patiently laid out the inequities inherent in Bush's tax cut plan and exposed the double talk employed by its advocates. In those days Krugman's tone was one of detached disbelief: They can't be serious. Surely, once people understand the facts, the nation will come to its senses. Over time, as the aftermath of 9/11 cast a pseudo-heroic penumbra around the once-feckless president and the "war on terror" provided him with myriad opportunities to slip pet policies into action, Krugman's detachment wore down -- Oh, hell, they are serious, and the facts aren't sticking -- and his tone shifted to engaged outrage.

The rhetoric grew angrier -- like this, from a February 2003 column, one of the most recent in the collection: "Although financial reporters have started to realize that Mr. Bush is out of control ... the sheer banana-republic irresponsibility of his plans hasn't been widely appreciated." And the old assumption that everyone will somehow wake up from this bad dream has evaporated from Krugman's worldview, leaving only a sense that we have made some truly colossal bad choices that will take generations to fix.

"The Great Unraveling" collects Krugman's best work, catching those mistakes in snapshot flashes of criticism as they were being made. No one wrote with more clarity and foresight on the California energy crisis (which had nothing to do with environmental regulations and everything to do with energy companies rigging markets). No one took Alan Greenspan to task more vigorously for betraying his own legacy in embracing Bush's budget-busting tax cuts. No one rode Bush harder for his dubious past as a crony capitalist who made his fortune thanks to his connections as a president's son, and to self-dealing accounting of the same species that later turned into a national scandal during his administration, with the implosion of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen and other corporate shell-game players.

Krugman is merciless about both the secrecy under which the Bush administration drew up its energy policies and the irrationality of the policies it coughed into the light. From the Bush White House's hostility to conservation and its obsession with opening the Alaskan tundra to oil drilling to its schizophrenic free-trade policies and its strange collusions with OPEC, Krugman surveys the landscape of Bush policy and finds a wasteland of brazen hypocrisy populated by "cynical political operators" wrapped in the flag, "an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain a populist facade."