American Psycho
(or American Idiot*)

David Carr is sampling from the wrong group of young Americans:

But the movie [The Social Network] could well serve as a referendum on business aggression and ambition that breaks along generational lines.

Many older people will watch the movie, which was No. 1 at the box office last weekend, and see a cautionary tale about a callous young man who betrays friends, partners and principles as he hacks his way to lucre and fame. But many in the generation who grew up in a world that Mr. Zuckerberg helped invent will applaud someone who saw his chance and seized it with both hands, mostly by placing them on the keyboard and coding something that no one else had.

By the younger cohort’s lights, when you make an omelet this big -- half a billion users -- a few eggs are going to get broken. Or as the film’s artful tag line suggests, "You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies along the way."

"When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films," said Scott Rudin, one of the producers. "The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created."

Ezra Klein reflects on the Gallup poll about who likes Obama:
18-29 year-olds   57%
65 and older        38%

If young people do not turn out for the mid-terms next month (they historically don't) and Republican retirees do as they historically do - what else do they have going on? - Republicans will take the House.

Onion review of American Psycho.
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*idiot is taken from the Greek idiotus meaning someone with no interest in politics

Obama in Rolling Stone:

The idea that we’ve got a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible.... We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard -- that’s what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we’ve got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place. If you’re serious, now’s exactly the time that people have to step up.

Krugman is right and the conventional wisdom is wrong. Again.

As Obama's former Presidential campaign manager David Plouffe has said about Novermber, it all depends on turnout.

This seems obvious, but everyone's saying the loss of the House is a foregone conclusion when it's not.

Ezra Klein says Gallup predicts the Democrats will lose in November. For some reason I doubt it.

Great New York Times editorial about campaign finance.

For all the headlines about the Tea Party and blind voter anger, the most disturbing story of this year’s election is embodied in an odd combination of numbers and letters: 501(c)(4). That is the legal designation for the advocacy committees that are sucking in many millions of anonymous corporate dollars, making this the most secretive election cycle since the Watergate years.
...
Corporations got the power to pour anonymous money into elections from Supreme Court and Federal Election Commission decisions in the last two years, culminating in the Citizens United opinion earlier this year. The effect is drastic: In 2004 and 2006, virtually all independent groups receiving electioneering donations revealed their donors. In 2008, less than half of the groups reported their donors, according to a study issued last week by the watchdog group Public Citizen. So far this year, only 32 percent of the groups have done so.

Most of the cash has gone to Republican operatives like Karl Rove who have set up tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organizations. In theory, these groups, with disingenuously innocuous names like American Crossroads and the American Action Network, are meant to promote social welfare. The value to the political operatives is that they are a funnel for anonymous campaign donations.

Mr. Rove’s group, American Crossroads, hopes to spend $50 million, and is already advertising against Democratic candidates in California, Pennsylvania, Nevada and other states. The American Action Network, led by Norm Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota, is spending $25 million, and has been blasting the Democratic senators Patty Murray in Washington and Russell Feingold in Wisconsin.

Excellent journalist Neil Irwin at the Washington Post writes about the Fed meeting next week.

These measures are likely to be the focus of a vigorous debate at a Fed policy meeting next week, setting the stage for a definitive decision in November or December on whether to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds in an effort to strengthen the economy. No action is likely at the policy meeting scheduled for Tuesday, which means monetary policy could remain in a holding pattern until the Fed committee reconvenes later in the fall.

Fed policymakers face two major questions: Will the weak economic recovery of the past few months persist through 2011? And would pumping vast new sums of money into the economy pack enough punch to be worth the risks?

Top Fed officials will be preparing formal forecasts for the economy over the coming years in advance of their meeting Nov. 2 and 3. If their consensus is that growth will be too slow next year to bring down the unemployment rate significantly, they will be more inclined to take action, even if the exact economic impact is modest and hard to predict, according to analysts who study the Fed.

I think there is no question growth will be too slow next year. The stimulus will end soon. Maybe they will wait until after the election.

Matt's Talking Loco and I Like It!

Yglesias on the Federal Reserve System:

Given the destructive impact the Dallas, Minneapolis, Richmond, and Kansas City Feds are having on national policy, it’s really time to revisit the absurd governance structure of these entities. The regional Fed presidents exercise important public policy authority, but they’re primarily selected by local for-profit business interests rather than by public officials. It would be as half the Supreme Court justices were selected by corporate law firms dispersed around the country. As long as the Fed seemed to be performing well, I suppose most people took an "if it ain’t broke don’t fix it" line. But the country is mired in tight money, and the regional feds seem to be behind it.

Mark Thoma comments on a Wall Street Journal "symposium" on monetary policy. Long story short: conservative policy makers respond with the usual tripe.

These guys and their type missed the housing bubble and missed the rise of the shadow banking system - the two prime causes of the crisis and slump. Actually not only did they miss the causes, their policy recommendations actively enabled the causes. And not only that, conservatives* tried to block policies like TARP and the stimulus that helped prevent another Great Depression!

As Krugman wrote:

But the story of 1938 also shows how hard it is to apply these insights. Even under F.D.R., there was never the political will to do what was needed to end the Great Depression; its eventual resolution came essentially by accident.

I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.

The governance structure of the Federal Reserve System and the United States Senate need to be revisited.

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* Bush was actually good on immigration, AIDS in Africa, and Islam as a religion of peace. He also appointed okay guys in Bernanke and Paulson who saved our asses. In his memoir Hank Paulson said Congressional Republicans were worthless during the crisis, especially the number two guy in the House, Eric Cantor. From a Newsweek summary:

Meetings with Senate Republicans were "a complete waste of time for us, when time was more precious than anything" (page 275). Ideas that Republicans do add are "unformed," like Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor’s plan to replace TARP with an insurance program. In a rare moment of sarcasm, Paulson goes off on the minority Whip: "I got a better idea. I’m going to go with Eric Cantor’s insurance program. That’s the idea to save the day" (page 285).

We Have the Technology and Know-How

If the Democrats do lose the House - see post below - it will be because A) the ARRA stimulus wasn't big enough B) Obama didn't nominate people to the Fed right away / Bernake is failing at his job C) a combo of A and B.

Part of the problem I think is that Obama's economic advisers didn't see the European sovereign debt crisis coming and it hit hard in May 2010.

However, Obama and his advisers should have known that financial crises of the type we just experienced are tough to come back from in a timely manner. They seemed to believe that they could come back for more stimulus if they needed it, but as Krugman pointed out, they were wrong. Plus the Fed is up against the zero bound and the FOMC is made up of dipshits.

The one good thing about this crisis is that it once again proves how Keynsian theories are correct for the most part, even though people want to have the debate all over again. Krugman blogs:

On the analytical front: many economists these days reject out of hand the Keynesian model, preferring to believe that a fall in supply rather than a fall in demand is what causes recessions. But there are clear implications of these rival approaches. If the slump reflects some kind of supply shock, the monetary and fiscal policies followed since the beginning of 2008 would have the effects predicted in a supply-constrained world: large expansion of the monetary base should have led to high inflation, large budget deficits should have driven interest rates way up. And as you may recall, a lot of people did make exactly that prediction. A Keynesian approach, on the other hand, said that inflation would fall and interest rates stay low as long as the economy remained depressed. Guess what happened?

On the policy front: there’s certainly a real debate over whether Obama could have gotten a bigger stimulus. What we do know, however, is that his top advisers did not frame the argument for a small stimulus compared with the projected slump purely in political terms. Instead, they argued that too big a plan would alarm the bond markets, and that anyway fiscal stimulus was only needed as an insurance policy. Neither of these arguments came from macroeconomic theory; they were doctrines invented on the fly. Samuelson 1948 would have said to provide a stimulus big enough to restore full employment -- full stop.

So what we have here isn’t really a lack of a workable analytical framework. The disaster we’re facing is the result of the refusal of economists, both in and out of the corridors of power, to go with the perfectly good framework we already had.

Which is reassuring in a way. The Pain Caucus, the Austerians, the "structuralists," the ones who are trying to usher in a new Dark Ages, all believe in conservative economic "thought" and are uncomfortable with Big Government. They can't admit that if it had not been for Big Government we'd currently be experiencing a second Great Depression.

Nate Silver's FiveThrityEight moves to the New York Times website.

I'm always skeptical of polls, but I link to Silver's site. He writes:

A casual reading of trends is somewhat unhelpful: Americans are unhappy with the direction of the country and, increasingly, with President Obama. But in contrast to 1994, the Republicans’ favorability ratings are also near all-time lows. Meanwhile, looking at a single statistical indicator does not provide for precision, and some indicators disagree with one another. It is perhaps necessary to dig a bit deeper -- to look at more data, and to do so in a more robust way -- in order to have a truly good handle on how things are most likely to proceed. And even then there can still be a lot of uncertainty in the forecast. FiveThirtyEight and its statistical models are willing to admit what they don’t know.

I don't think the Democrats will lose either the House or Senate.

Biden predicts Democrats hold House and Senate.

Carl Huse on the Democrats' achievements and the lack of celebration.

During a luncheon in early August with select Democratic senators in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, President Obama gave voice to that sentiment. He told his guests, according to lawmakers, that Democrats were winning and that critics within the party were wrongly focused on "what didn’t happen rather than what we have accomplished."

Democrats offer several rationales for why they are not breaking through with their legislative successes. They note that some of the chief benefits of the health care law and the overhaul of the financial industry, for instance, will not be felt for years. And they say that a news media environment that thrives on conflict makes it harder to get out their message about constructive achievements. Most important, they say, difficult economic times produce a disgruntled public.

"People are sour now," said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate. "Times are bad, and people are worried about the future. So they say, all these things are good, but are they making my life better?"

Maureen Dowd's "No Love from the Lefties" on Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs.

Yeah but in the long term you're dead.

The Republican push to amend the 14th amendment may be good short-term politics but is horrible long-term politics, something Karl Rove and George W. Bush would probably agree with.

Likewise the long-term demographic trends are good for Democrats, but more old timers turn out for midterms, which is good for Republicans. Jonathan Chait blogs:

The second aspect is the old-ification of the Republican Party. 2009-2010 have been dominated by a health care debate that splits oldsters, who despise health care reform, from all other age groups, who approve of it. The generational split seems to have deepening partisan overtones. In the long run, this is a boon for Democrats. In the short run, it's a disaster, because old people vote in midterm elections and young people don't:

Exit poll data shows that the electorate skews older, particularly in nonpresidential election years. In 2006, 63 percent of those who cast ballots were 45 or older, and in 2008, that same age group made up 53 percent of the electorate, according to exit poll data from the National Election Pool. This group made up about half of the adult population in those years.

The thread connecting both these factors is a belief that the presidency is the end-all, be-all of American politics. Young people and liberals get very excited about presidential elections. When the other party holds the White House, they can get fired up about turning them out. When their party wins, they expect all their problems to be solved. When the problems don't disappear immediately, they get disillusioned.

Bill Clinton's primary candidate loses in Colorado. 

Conservatives continue to cocoon hard:

But in this state’s Republican primary, a Tea Party-backed insurgent, Ken Buck, upended the candidate endorsed by Washington Republicans, Jane Norton, a former lieutenant governor.

Obama turned 49 yesterday and is 18 months into his presidency.

Over at DailyKos, David Sirota echoes a common complaint that Obama is meaner to the left than to the right. Jonathan Chait responds at his blog.

The massive enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans has numerous causes, but surely one of them is the exquisite sensitivity to insult displayed by progressive activists.

Sirota complains about the war in Afghanistan and the public option. The fact is that one of Obama's campaign promises was to focus on Afghanistan and pull out of Iraq. Also it seems to me he accomodated Pelosi by giving a July 2011 draw-down date. Regarding the public option, Senator Lieberman blocked it, end of story.

It's fine to try to move the Overton window but one should strive to be accurate about what the Obama administration has accomplished.

They came into office in the midst of the the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. They did some unpopular things to stabilize the situation in the face of rock solid Republican obstructionism. They enacted the stimulus (ARRA) which for all its faults was necessary. They appointed some good people to the Federal Reserve Bank and the National Labor Relations Board. They nominated two liberalish Supreme Court judges and passed liberalish health care reform - which was controversial and spawned the Teabaggers. They passed financial regulation reform in the face of rock solid Republican obstructionism. Regarding health care reform they went the reconciliation route which is pretty confrontational.

They confronted Arizona over its outlandish immigration policies. I'm sure there are things I'm forgetting, but one thing people should be reminded of is that Obama hasn't massively screwed up. That takes skill. And luck.

Most of all he has kept progressive politics in the game.* The analogy I like to make is that in juggling and in hacky-sack the object of the game is to keep the ball in the air. You lose if it hits the ground. Obama has kept the ball in the air in the face of some tough economic challenges.

Robert Reich writes about the "enthusiasm gap."

Hopefully Obama will nominate Elizabeth Warren.**
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* One of my favorite moments was when during his live on-air State of the Union speech, Obama called out the Roberts Supreme Court over their recently-made Citizens United ruling. And they were seated right in front of him. So there's a good example of being confrontational with conservatives even if they're members of a very powerful co-equal branch of government. And money in politics - the subject of the ruling - is the ultimate source of many of the problems Obama has been dealing with, whether it's the private sector failure in the financial markets or the private sector failure in our health care system, the latter of which we will have to deal with in order to fix the Federal government's long term budget problems.
** Ugh, Christina Romer is rumored to be resigning.

The Kids Are All Right
(but they need to turn out in November)

Charlie Cook looks at the polls and says we may be seeing a turning point for the Democrats.

Gallup noted that this was the first time that either party has held an advantage of this size for two consecutive weeks. In the 21 weeks that Gallup has asked the generic ballot test question this year, the two parties have averaged a tie. It should be noted, however, that polls of registered voters inherently tilt Democratic by 4 or 5 points compared with polls of likely midterm election voters. Voter turnout for midterm elections is about a third less than it is in presidential years, and midterm voters tend to be whiter and older, two problem population groups for Democrats this year.

For the four previous weeks, the two parties were tied at 46 percent on the generic ballot question. For the four weeks before that, Republicans averaged a 3-point lead, 48 percent to 45 percent. So, if Democrats really have turned up the heat and are running 4 or 5 points ahead among registered voters, the practical result would be about an even proposition among likely midterm voters and the national popular vote. If that were true, it would mean a very, very close contest for control of the House.

(via Jonathan Chait)

Polarization

Clive Crook says that Obama's big mistake was refusing to "disown the left." Krugman is right to disagree.

Obama has been moderately leftish. With interest rates at zero and the economy needing a jump-start, Obama did a stimulus but failed to take the left's advice to make it sufficiently large. Maybe he didn't have the votes.

Obama passed health care reform with its liberal goal of fixing the malfunctioning private sector and fiscally conservative goal of fixing the long term deficit problem. However he did not follow the left's advice and include a public option. Maybe he didn't have the votes.

Obama passed reform of the banking and financial system in response to the Great Clusterfuck of 2008. He didn't follow the left's advice and nationalize and/or break up the biggest "zombie" banks. This could have caused panic and further damage at a time when the global economy was fragile. Or it could helped the banks deleverage in an orderly manner and saved the taxpayers money. For me it's an open question. (They did end up performing "stress tests" to boost confidence, something the Europeans are copying in response to their sovereign debt crisis.) If we enter a "lost decade" it could be seen as a missed opportunity. Although a lot of banks have been liquified and/or absorbed into other banks, something the Firebaggers refuse to acknowlege.

Obama did follow the left's advice in creating a financial consumer protection agency, but housed it in the Federal Reserve Bank and might not back Elizabeth Warren's appointment to head it.

Jonathan Chait points out that Republicans have been unapologeticaly embracing the far Right and will lose elections in November because of this.

...The Nevada Senate race is a prime example. Harry Reid, once a dead man walking, is now sitting on a nice lead because Republicans nominated a lunatic to oppose him. "A total f*** up by the state and national Republicans to allow Angle to get nominated," a source notes to Ben Smith.

But of course there are numerous such fuckups. In Kentucky, Republicans turned a rock-solid safe seat into a toss up by nominating ultra-radical Rand Paul over party hack Trey Grayson. In Pennsylvania, they turned a relatively safe seat in Arlen Specter, who had been almost completely housebroken by the right since 2004, into another toss-up. (More importantly, they drove Specter from the party and made him the 60th Senate seat, allowing the passage of health care reform.) And in Florida, they turned another safe hold into a toss-up by challenging, and driving from the party, Charlie Crist.

Florida is actually the closest thing to a rational move for the right. First, I think Crist's current lead is far from safe, because the Democratic vote is likely to consolidate above its current abysmal level and that will come out of Crist's hide. Second, Crist is a genuine moderate, so there really was a more reasonable risk-reward calculation for conservatives looking to gain a more ideologically reliable Senator at the risk of losing the seat altogether. There's at least a strong chance that the Rubio challenge will burn them.

This is four Senate seats put at serious risk by running right-wing primary challenges, plus one enormous liberal domestic policy accomplishment. In all these instances, conservatives either celebrated the right-wing primary challenge or, at the very least, quietly accepted it. There was very little pushback at the time from the party establishment, other than a feeble effort in Kentucky. I have seen no recriminations whatsoever in hindsight. And yet it seems perfectly clear that the effect of these challenges has been a disaster from the conservative perspective. You don't have to love Sue Lowden to understand that a 90% chance of Lowden winning is better than a 20% chance of Sharron Angle winning.

Yglesias's predictions for November 2010:

After all, Republicans are dead-certain to pick up Senate seats in North Dakota and Arkansas and favored in 5 or 6 more good pickup opportunities. Once that happens, who’s really going to care about Scott Brown? The action will shift to Mark Kirk or Charlie Crist or someone else.

Krugman was absolutely right about the stimulus enacted after Obama entered office. It was too small.

DeLong writes:

Q: Will President Barack Obama's "recovery summer" convince voters the $787 billion stimulus package is pulling the economy out of recession?

My Answer: The problem is that the stimulus package Obama proposed was about 2/3 the size that Obama's economic technocrats thought appropriate in December of 2008, that the marginal votes needed in Congress--Snowe, Nelson, et cetera--cut its effectiveness down to half and had the bargaining power to do so because every single other Republican thought their job #1 was to make Obama look like a failure, and that the magnitude of the financial shock to the world economy turned out to be about twice as big as we were estimating in December 2008.

Thus we did about 1/4 of the job. It was clear relatively early that we had done about 1/4 of the job. Even on February 15, 2009, Mark Zandi--who had been John McCain's chief economic advisor during the 2009 campaign--was out there publicly saying that it was clear that we had not done the whole job.

Given that we did only 1/4 of the job, it looks like the stimulus has been quite effective: unemployment has stayed under 10%.

As an Obamabot, I understand the obstacles he was facing in early 2009. The question I have - and I honestly I don't know the answer - is should Obama and his economic advisors laid this out in early 2009 and/or should they say this now?

I'm leaning towards the affirmative, however, in 2009 there were a lot of "unknown unknowns" like the impending European Debt Crisis, the BP oil disaster, and known unknowns like Fed policy and market behavior. Perhaps the best policy is get what you can and hold off on the predictions.

Optimism/Pessimism, Spin and Public Policy

One thing I've noticed about discussing the economy is that if you want more stimulus and less austerity, it's suggested that you highlight how bad things are. Yesterday, Duncan Black wrote that he was looking for bad news in today's job report.

As I've written before, I have no desire to destroy the Village to save it, and I have no desire for a single more person to be without a job. But the number that comes out tomorrow is just an estimate, and all estimates are imperfect. I'm not confident that anything will spur elites to do more, but the best chance we have is bad news, or a bad estimate of the actual news. The reality should be bad enough, but for some reason it isn't.

Also, people who have been arguing for more stimulus can say "I told you so" if or when the numbers are bad.

But that can be depressing, so sometimes it's nice to highlight the bright spots in the economy, like the fact that it's growing (however slowly) and the private sector added around 83,000 jobs last month (better than losing jobs). Also, the worse the economy is, the better the Republicans will do in November.

Ezra Klein writes about the White House's dilemma.

"Today’s employment report shows continued signs of gradual labor market recovery," reads the first line of Christina Romer's analysis of the May jobs report. She emphasizes the 83,000 jobs created in the private sector (the 125,000 net job loss is due to census jobs expiring), and says that non-census employment rose by 100,000. That's true, and it may be an important way to look at it, but the census jobs were still jobs, and we're not growing nearly fast enough to reabsorb those workers.

Romer's blog post and recent statements from and meetings with administration officials suggest that the White House's broad approach on the economy is to emphasize how much improvement there is, rather than how much needs to be done. That makes political sense, of course: The economy has largely stabilized, which is a huge achievement, and the only chance Democrats have in the midterms is convincing the country that they're responsible for that stabilization. But it also makes it difficult for the White House to run around with its hair on fire about how bad things are and how necessary it is that Congress doesn't abandon the labor market in order to pretend to care about the deficit.

Probably, the best practice is to try to describe the situation as accurately as possible. Christina Romer isn't running around with her hair on fire, but in the blog post Klein links to, she does assert that the country needs much stronger job growth.

June marks the sixth month in a row that private sector employment has increased.  These continued signs of healing are important, particularly given the recent volatility in world markets and the mixed behavior of other recent economic indicators.  However, much stronger job gains are needed to repair the damage caused by the financial crisis and put the millions of unemployed Americans back to work.

As Dean Baker would point out, the blowing and popping of the housing bubble (in the US and Europe) caused the financial crisis and caused a massive drop in demand. Coordinated action by the world's governments helped stabilize the economy, but stronger job gains are needed to repair the damage caused by the bursting of the bubble and the financial crisis.

To end on a somewhat bright note, David Leonhardt writes that the government is probably understating job growth right now.

As a rule of thumb, the government has understated job growth by roughly 50,000 to 100,000 jobs a month during the first year after a recession’s end. The main reason is the difficulty estimating job changes at new businesses and failing ones. Floyd Norris has written about this issue.

None of this guarantees the government is making the same mistake again. And even if it is, the economy remains a very long way from being healthy. But it’s worth keeping in mind.

Democrats See Signs of Hope in Job Trends

WTF?

New York Times writer Michael Luo is probably being a smart-ass. In the piece he argues that states with lots of close races this November are seeing job growth, even if unemployment overall remains near 10 percent, which is unbelievably high. (There have been three quarters of growth, but jobs aren't being created in net as states slash budgets and Europe's sovereign debt crisis keeps investors cautious.) Things could be worse. But this little opinion really bothered me:

While much attention has been paid to the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate, political scientists have found little correlation between that measure and midterm elections results. Instead, they have found more broad-based indicators, particularly real personal disposable per capita income, which measures the amount of money a household has after taxes and inflation, to be better gauges.

 The blog post he links to seems wrong to me. The "politcal scientist" blogger links to some left wing blogs (some I like - Talking Point Memo, Krugman, Nate Silver - some anti-Obama blogs I don't like - Lawyers, Guns and Money, Hullabaloo, Freakonomics - and some that are so-so - Eschaton.

The blogger pulls this out of his butt:

So why might income growth matter but unemployment not matter for elections? It's possible that unemployment fluctuations disproportionately affect people at the lower end of the income spectrum -- people who aren't terribly likely to vote in midterms and, if they do, are probably voting Democratic anyway. Growth in disposable income, however, affects everybody, including the moderate voters who will switch party allegiances from time to time.

It's also possible that high unemployment means low aggregate demand mean low growth which means low growth in disposable income.

High unemployment means a loose labor market. This guy just confirms my low opinion of "political scientists." I like "economists" much better and "political economists" most of all.
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NB: I've included a new label "The Dark Ages" in honor of Professor Krugman, a true Hypatia for our time. (Looking forward to seeing the Rachel Weisz movie Agora. I did see Get Him to the Greek, which has a Krugman cameo, and thought it was pretty good.) Simon Johnson believes Krugman should replace the departing Peter Orszag as budget director. Yes we can!