Krugman says "Don't Panic"

Paul Krugman, one of my "no go's" because his vitriol in the past has pissed me off too many times, got "the big click" from me friday for the first time in a long time.

The title of the column is "Fiscal Scare Tactics".   Maybe a part of me wondered what "Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman" (as the MSM always introduces him) had to say about our huge budget deficits and slippping credit rating and the people we're making ourselves beholden to.  I wanted some good news.  Maybe he had an argument that would convince me that everything's going to be OK if we keep on this path.

Alas, a little ways down in the article he says:

the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.
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True, there is a longer-term budget problem. Even a full economic recovery wouldn’t balance the budget, and it probably wouldn’t even reduce the deficit to a permanently sustainable level.

Soooooo.... even without what the Obama administration is doing, the huge spending of a boat load of money that we don't have -- and we had a full recovery, our budget still sits at an unsustainable level. 

And that's supposed to make me feel better .... how?????

It couldn't possibly be that we're overextended.  It's just that our income has gone down.   All of this overextension is just an inconvenient side detail, right?  Government's not too big, we're just not bringing in enough tax revenue!

They only spend 1/3 of the first $787 billion (now I read actually $862 billion) in the first year and want yet another stimulus jobs bill...

And we're being "hysterical" when we talk about wasteful government spending in the face of a very deep recession.  Paul goes on to say, much like Obama's "spending freeze" (I know I'm bleeding profusely, but I vow not to cut myself anymore after this time) after another year ...

So once the economic crisis is past, the U.S. government will have to increase its revenue and control its costs.

Yeah, I'll stop charging things on my credit cards after this spending spree. I promise.