Krugman hit by boomerang

In a blog post today, Krugman tries to refute commenters who pointed to Germany's positive economical performance as alleged evidence for the advantages of reducing the deficit. Sadly, the good Prof seeked refuge to onesidedly using a GDP growth chart as a way to fight back, deliberately omitting the unemployment numbers which show a totally different picture. Just more of his usual badmouthing of Germany. He should have pointed to all the differences between Germany and the US instead, and argued that America can't simply copy single policies, but would have to copy the whole system to get into the same situation. That would have been more fair towards us, and the better argument, too. However, I already wrote about this, and I want to focus on another point now.

And that is that it actually was Krugman who played a most prominent role in providing this ammunition for the austerity advocates! Since the start of the year, he has been picking on Germany, complaining about us not doing enough for stimulus, and painting a picture of doom and gloom about the consequences of our (mostly cosmetic) austerity measures. During all those months, his readers waited for the bad news from Germany to show up in the headlines. But all they found were reports about a positive development month after month after month. Can he honestly blame them now for believing that apparently the rebound can be accomplished without much stimulus, and despite austerity policies? He distorted the situation in Germany for months, and now this turned out to be a boomerang that came back to hit him. Serves him well!

Really, with a lot of respect (and I'm still a fan), but Krugman's picking on Germany was unfair, misguided and strategically wrong. During the time he wasted trying to talk our folks into more of a stimulus, when the development showed them this wasn't necessary, the situation in the US deteriorated. I know, hindsight is 20/20, but didn't he ever have second thoughts that he may be flogging the wrong a**, uh, donkey? D'oh.

(based on a comment at Krugman's blog)