Liberal economist slams Obama

Paul Krugman. Photo / Bloomberg

The Nobel prize-winning American economist Paul Krugman is disarmingly frank about his weaknesses.

"Loner. Ordinarily shy. Shy with individuals," he told New York magazine.

But the diminutive, bearded Princeton University theorist knows precisely how to aim an intellectual poisoned dart at the heart of the Washington establishment.

The Republicans, according to Krugman, are "the party of the stupid".

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown might, just possibly, have "saved the world". Europeans are pharaohs - kings of denial. And if Barack Obama doesn't call his congressional extortionists' bluff in endless battles over the United States deficit, he might as well "move out of the White House and hand the keys over to the Tea Party".

Krugman, 58, is the American liberal chattering classes' favourite wonk and his specialist subject is the one that will dominate Obama's re-election campaign: the American economy.

He shot to prominence for his devastating diagnoses of George Bush's economic deficiencies in a twice-weekly column for the New York Times. Yet far from celebrating the Democrats' ascendancy, he has become Obama's thorniest critic from the left.

He is possibly the only Nobel laureate economist to have a fan club on Facebook with 2300 members.

In a tone of perpetual exasperation, Krugman has documented his growing "despair" with Obama, berating the President for failing to stimulate the US economy adequately, for spinelessness in addressing Wall St bonuses and for naivety in extending an olive branch to Republican hardliners over budget negotiations.

"Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn't seem to stand for anything in particular?" Krugman asked this month, not long after joining five fellow left-leaning economists - Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder and Larry Mishel - at an Oval Office summit in which the President was berated for failing to tackle joblessness.

Comfortable on his perches at Princeton and on the New York Times editorial page, Krugman is the archetype of the east coast liberal elite disparaged by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, who never waste an opportunity to point out that he briefly served as a consultant to the doomed energy trading group Enron, earning US$50,000.

His statistic-laden arguments are the opposite of populism and carry little resonance in the US heartland. But he has perfected the tricky task of lacing seemingly watertight academic theses with political invective.

His latest target was conservative congressman Paul Ryan, author of the Republicans' spending-slashing budget plan.

"What people like Paul Ryan are trying to do is set us on a glide path to a much harsher society," Krugman told an interviewer.

"A country in which, step by step, more and more people are cast out into a situation of not having health insurance and poverty, and so we slide back to a Victorian notion that life is full of evils and that's too bad but that's just the way that God made the world."

Such polemic draws rebukes from those who feel Krugman's language crosses the line from academia into politics. William Anderson, an economist at Maryland's Frostburg State University, says: "Here is a guy who will twist the facts of history to make a politically partisan point. I expect that from a politician. I don't expect it from a Nobel prize-winning economist."

Anderson, who maintains a blog called "Krugman-in-wonderland", accuses him of blaming every US economic ill on Republicans - even when the Democrats were culpable, too.

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