Letter to Paul Krugman

March 21, 2015 Saturday,

Dear Paul,

Your column on Friday was excellent. It was a very needed, and it was not something that I have heard coming from you quite so forthrightly before. It was simple straightforward exposure of what has been going on for some thirty to forty years now.

When you said, “The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics.” You gave me pause. However, as you soon pointed out, “Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.” I saw then that what you meant by “something new” was that the dishonesty used to be more cleverly hidden, but now it is “raw”.

This disintegration from clever sophistry to blatant corruption is a frequent development in the psychotic behavior of individuals who suffer from delusions of power. The more they convince themselves of the rightness of their delusions the less interested they are in working with others or in cloaking them in some form of sheep’s wool.  Look at the life cycle of any of the numerous crazy dictators, Nero say or Hitler, who have from time to time sprung up in the world and generated so much pain.

Your closing comment, “Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We're looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.” is well worth repeating over and over.

Our Brothers and Sisters are pretty well immersed in the flood of sophism that streams from all of our media day in and day out. The generation of this huge smokescreen by the way is a major, deliberate, and very smart aspect of the “Con Job”.

One more thing, Paul, you said, “But I'm partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.”

This analysis is not Cynicism, Paul. It is facing and voicing straight Truth. And, we better start being able to face it and deal with it as it actually is rather than to continue to make excuses for it and to hope or wish that these brothers will “wake up.” You can see how well that attitude served us in our relations with some of the “governments” of the Near East.

I hope that you will continue to put your very considerable Light on these issues. The simple straight forward commentary is so much more powerful and helpful  to many of us who are not students of the arcane ins and out of economics.

Lots of love

-tom