Paul Krugman talks about the human tragedy behind the economic policy failures of the Obama administration, which has prioritized deficit reduction over putting people back to work:

It goes without saying that the explosion of long-term unemployment is a tragedy for the unemployed themselves. But it may also be a broader economic disaster.

The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy. This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.

One piece of evidence comes from the relationship between job openings and unemployment. Normally these two numbers move inversely: the more job openings, the fewer Americans out of work. And this traditional relationship remains true if we look at short-term unemployment. But as William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University recently showed, the relationship has broken down for the long-term unemployed: a rising number of job openings doesn’t seem to do much to reduce their numbers. It’s as if employers don’t even bother looking at anyone who has been out of work for a long time.

To test this hypothesis, Mr. Ghayad then did an experiment, sending out résumés describing the qualifications and employment history of 4,800 fictitious workers. Who got called back? The answer was that workers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.

So we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.

And let’s be clear: this is a policy decision. The main reason our economic recovery has been so weak is that, spooked by fear-mongering over debt, we’ve been doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says you shouldn’t do — cutting government spending in the face of a depressed economy.

It’s hard to overstate how self-destructive this policy is. Indeed, the shadow of long-term unemployment means that austerity policies are counterproductive even in purely fiscal terms. Workers, after all, are taxpayers too; if our debt obsession exiles millions of Americans from productive employment, it will cut into future revenues and raise future deficits.

Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe. It’s ruining many lives, and at the same time making us poorer and weaker in every way. And the longer we persist in this folly, the greater the damage will be.

So like Young Ezra, Krugman hears that the White House is offering the chained CPI to "prove" he's willing to compromise. (As if that wasn't obvious already.) I don't pretend to understand Obama's psyche, but I can't help but notice how much he reminds me of my friends who had alcoholic parents: "Please, Mommy, Daddy, please don't fight! I'll be good!"

The question is, to whom are these things being “proved”?

Since the beginning, the Obama administration has seemed eager to gain the approval of the grownups — the sensible people who will reward efforts to be Serious, and eventually turn on those nasty, intransigent Republicans as long as Obama and co. don’t cater too much to the hippies.This is the latest, biggest version of that strategy. Unfortunately, it will almost surely fail. Why? Because there are no grownups — only people who try to sound like grownups, but are actually every bit as childish as anyone else.

After all, if whoever it is that Obama is trying to appeal to here — I guess it’s the Washington Post editorial page and various other self-proclaimed “centrist” pundits — were willing to admit the fundamental asymmetry in our political debate, willing to admit that if DC is broken, it’s because of GOP radicalism, they would have done it long ago. It’s not as if this reality was hard to see.

But the truth is that the “centrists” aren’t sincere. Calls for centrism and bipartisanship aren’t actual demands for specific policies — they’re an act, a posture these people take to make themselves seem noble and superior. And that posture requires blaming both parties equally, no matter what they do or propose. Obama’s budget will garner faint praise at best, quickly followed by denunciations of the president for not supplying the Leadership (TM) to make Republicans compromise — which means that he’s just as much at fault as they are, see?

So let’s nominate Michael Bloomberg, who will offer the exact same policies but, you know, really mean it (and supply Leadership (TM)).

No, seriously (but not Seriously): who do you think could possibly be persuaded by this budget who hasn’t already been persuaded?

They were at it again. The so-called "mainstream media" on their Sunday news shows, telling the American people what's going on in an objective, journalistic manner.

Oh, sorry, April Fools Day was last week....

Instead, we were treated to more fools on the hill, talking foolish nonsense.

As Nicole Belle explains:

It’s really tempting to talk about the establishment media as a monolith, even though it really isn’t true. But listen to these chuckleheads and tell me that they are not actively colluding to hurt the country.

Jim Cramer, who famously had his stock picks analyzed and found to perform worse than the market average, is convinced he has the answer to our economic and job woes: the Keystone Pipeline!

Fox News Anchor Greta Van Susteren, who oddly showed up on an ABC News show, failed miserably in trying to explain why the Republicans refuse to raise taxes: because we don’t have the money. Go ahead, make sense of that. Luckily, Paul Krugman was there to set her straight on another ‘laughable’ assertion that the Obama administration was strangling businesses with regulations and that was why the March jobs report was so dismal.

Lindsey Graham didn’t pass up another chance to be on the Sunday shows and let us know what a drama queen he is. He vowed to keep up the Benghazi outrage if Hillary Clinton officially runs for president. But that’s not all. He’s really, really encouraged that Obama is willing to let Grandma eat catfood, because he characterized it as the president “showing a little bit of leg here.” Can I just say ew?

Swanson heir Tucker Carlson, the new host of Fox & Friends Weekend, thinks unemployment insurance benefits are unnecessary and wasteful, but his guest John Tamny, editor of Forbes and RealClearPolitics has to one up Carlson by suggesting that scrapping UEI altogether would be the kindest to the poor, because it disincentives them from looking for work.

Hear Nicole Belle and Nicole Sandler with "Fools on the Hill" every Monday morning at 11:20 ET, or archived anytime, at RadioOrNot.com

Every Monday morning, C&L's Nicole Belle joins Nicole Sandler on her Radio or Not show to recap the Sunday talk shows.

This week, the conversation began with a discussion of the myriad of stories that should have been discussed, but weren't....

From Nicole Belle:

There are many, many issues this country is facing that merit a serious discussion on the Sunday shows. For example:

• Rand Paul’s filibuster of the Brennan nomination could have led to a much needed discussion on the use of drones and the oversight executed thereof.
• We could talk about the revelation that banks illegally foreclosed on military members who were fully paid up on their mortgages and how the deregulation of the banking industry made it impossible for people to know who actually owned the note on their mortgage.
• We could talk about how Newt Gingrich’s personal sugar daddy likely broke federal laws against bribing foreign officials and how all that money he spent on GOP politics was likely an investment against an indictment.
• We could talk about how conservatives think it’s an appropriate response to post racist , violent comments to a rape survivor when she dares to suggest that rather than telling women to arm themselves to prevent rape, we should tell men not to rape.
• We could even have a discussion about how racism is still so prevalent in our “post-racial” society.

But no, that wouldn’t happen on the Sunday shows, because those are issues that Americans are actually grappling with. Instead, guess who all five of the major Sunday news shows booked?

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As Duncan always says:

It's part of the media game that they'll put up somebody who knows nothing about anything relevant against someone who does as if they're all the same.

The 'know nothing' being Joe Scarborough and the 'who does" is Paul Krugman. Now the only thing The Scar knows about these days is how to use the camera. Krugman's weakest attribute at times in his career is his debating style on TV. There's nothing wrong with that, but Paul's 'Denver moments" allowed Joe to effectively evade most of the night's 'debate' in favor of gotcha's and the unforeseen catastrophe.

Well, we’ll see how it comes out after editing, but I feel that I just had my Denver debate moment: I was tired, cranky, and unready for the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff (In 1997 you said that the aging population was a big problem! When Social Security was founded life expectancy was only 62!) Oh, and I wasn’t prepared for Joe Scarborough’s slipperiness about what he actually advocates (he’s for more spending in the near term? Who knew?)

Joe@NBC actually made a passionate argument for addressing the debt now because of the possibilty of some unforeseen catastrophe happening. Yea, that's what drives him in this debate. maybe another meteor will crash down upon us, cracking the planet and ending all life on the planet too.

And who knew that The Scar doesn't mind gov't spending in the near term to help our economy to grow? The only thing I ever hear from him and conservatives like him is that we have to cut government spending NOW. That bullshit flew out of Joe's mouth like a frothy ale. And that laid the foundation for his typical conservative whopper about life expectancy:

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Every Monday morning, C&L's own Nicole Belle joins me on my Radio or Not show for a segment we call "Fools on the Hill". We watch the Sunday shows so you don't have to, and we two Nicoles bring you the best of the best (or as is often the case, the worst of the worst).

Today, Nicole Belle brings us this:

There’s a famous phenomena in psychology known as “Flashed Face Distortion”. When a pair of perfectly attractive faces are flashed in front of a viewer, aligned at the eye level, all their dissimilarities are heightened and distorted to the point of being perceived as grotesque.

There’s a similar parallel in politics. When liberal ideas are merely flashed out to audiences, they appear distorted and unnatural, because we never get a good look at them. I blame the media in this, because for all their talk of “both sides doing it,” they rarely give us any more than a cursory glance at liberal ideas, thus distorting them completely to their viewers. I’m convinced that if most Americans got to take a nice long look at them, they wouldn’t find them grotesque at all.

But there is no shortage of conservative ideas given full coverage on the Sunday shows. Would that they appear as distorted as the short shrift they give liberal ideas.

Speaking of liberal ideas, Paul Krugman was on Up with Chris Hayes, which is enough for a liberal fangirl to start squealing in delight. But as if to reiterate the point I made above, Krugman reminds Hayes that nothing that he advocates is that radical. It is literally Macroeconomics 101. But they are completely alien concepts to the insulated Beltway Bubble.

On the other end of the spectrum, Eric Cantor tells David Gregory that he doesn’t know what the DREAM Act is any more, but he thinks we need to work on a pathway to citizenship for children. Psst….Cantor, that is *exactly* what the DREAM Act addresses.

To hear Republicans talk about immigration at all is an exercise of “Who do you want to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” Case in point: John “Build the dang wall” McCain challenging Republicans to not block giving undocumented workers a pathway to citizenship: “What do you want to do with them?”

McCain’s BFF Lindsey Graham never misses an opportunity (or a Sunday, come to that) to play partisan politics and criticize the president. Ignoring completely the infamous 7 minutes that George W. Bush read “My Pet Goat” while the worst terrorist act on our shores occurred, Graham accuses President Obama of being “disengaged” on the anniversary of 9/11 and therefore, personally responsible for the deaths in Benghazi.

And finally, the Rand family is feeling quite testy of late. While Daddy Ron is now appealing to the UN (which he doesn’t believe in) to help him take away the RonPaul.com domain name from his supporters, baby Rand is feeling that Ashley Judd hasn’t got the gravitas of a self-certified ophthalmologist to run for the Senate for the state of Kentucky.

The Nicole Sandler Show airs live Monday through Thursday mornings from 10-noon ET and is always available for listening via podcast at RadioOrNot.com. Nicole Belle joins in for Fools on the Hill every Monday morning at around 11:20 ET.

Remember these words from Paul Krugman last week?

The threat to the recovery is Washington.

In anticipation of President Obama's State of the Union address this coming Tuesday, Chris Hayes asked what economist Paul Krugman (who has been right about economic issues all along, mind you) what he would like to hear in the address. While acknowledging with resignation that he probably won't get his wish, Krugman responds that he'd rather not hear the legitimization of deficit pearl clutching and advocation of austerity measures.

Like the rest of us liberals clamoring to be heard through the self-protecting insulation of the Beltway Bubble, Krugman makes the point that none of what he's advocated is more sophisticated than Econ 101, a class one would assume that every college graduate (which would be most members of Congress ) has taken. Yet these very basic economic concepts are alien to the Beltway.

It’s a very insular culture in Washington. It’s one of people who hang out together, who talk to each other, who don’t listen…what’s odd about my position on this stuff is I am, for the most part, not doing any kind of odd, unorthodox economics. I’m doing Macroeconomics 101, but that is not what people in DC hear. It’s not that they just don’t accept it. For the most part, they haven’t even heard about it. The notion that oh, the budget deficit is not a problem when the economy is depressed is barely in the Washington discourse. And because I’m still in touch with Macroeconomics 101, I’m really sort of out of it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we already know the solutions to our economic woes. We've gotten out of them before and we know what works. It has never been cutting spending and lowering taxes, no matter how many Republicans get booked on the Sunday shows to flood the discourse.

But in a sad addition to the "both sides do it" meme, the fact remains that even though these basic economic concepts and solutions remain patently obvious to those of us outside the Beltway Bubble, even those who should understand and embrace Keynesian economics miss the point, continually, as Dan Pfeiffer proves with this White House blog:

With less than three weeks before devastating, across the board cuts - the so-called "sequester" - are slated to hit, affecting our national security, job creation and economic growth, we must make sure we are having a debate over how to deal with these looming deadlines that is based on facts- not myths being spread by some Congressional Republicans who would rather see these cuts hit than ask the wealthiest and big corporations to pay a little bit more.

First, the notion that President Obama hasn't put forward a solution to deal with these looming cuts is false. In the fall of 2011, the President put forward a proposal to the Supercommittee for the specific purpose of laying out his vision to resolve the sequester and reduce our deficit by over $4 trillion dollars in a balanced way- by cutting spending, finding savings in entitlement programs and asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share. That proposal would have completely turned off the sequester while further reducing our deficit and ensuring we could still invest in the things we need to grow our economy and create jobs. That same approach was presented to Congress in the President's budget last year. And the President's last offer to Speaker Boehner in December remains on the table- an offer that meets the Republicans halfway on spending and on revenues, and would permanently turn off the sequester and put us on a fiscally sustainable path.

We should have a debate over how to best reduce the deficit. But with only three weeks until these indiscriminate cuts hit, Congress should find a short term package to give themselves a little more time to find a solution to permanently turn off the sequester. That package should have balance and include spending cuts and revenues.

Why on earth do we accept the framing of these ill-informed, petulant children on how the economy works instead of demanding that we adopt the measures that brought this country back into unprecedented levels of prosperity for most of its citizens after the Great Depression? When do the adults with the real solutions get their place at the table?

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The threat to the recovery is Washington.

There is more truth in those seven words than in the entire 11.5 hours of Sunday news programming we monitor put together.

We were at the precipice of a global economic catastrophe, thanks directly to Republican policies, at the time that Barack Obama was inaugurated. While it's difficult to gauge success from the absence of devastation, there is no argument that the preemptory measures taken in the early days of the first Obama term did slowly turn the economy around. There's far to go still, especially when it come to jobs, but we're at least moving away from the cliff.

But...

If Republicans still take their marching orders from deep thinkers like Rush that could change. And Carly Fiorina shows the same fundamental understanding of the drivers of the economy that enabled her as a CEO to drive two major American corporations into the ground. For her, we have to keep cutting federal spending because...bureaucrats!

FIORINA: I think it's important to remember when we talk about the economy that a private-sector job and a public-sector job are not the same things. They're not equivalent. I'm not saying public-sector jobs aren't important, but a private sector job pays for itself. A private-sector job creates other jobs. A public-sector job is paid for by taxpayers.

The government does not spend and invest money as efficiently as the private sector. There's all kinds of data to support that. So it isn't simply a matter of saying, well, whatever job is created out there, if it's a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., or a small-business owner hiring another employer, those are not equivalent thing.

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: ... when you say public-sector jobs, it is not a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.

FIORINA: Oh, it is, actually.

KRUGMAN: When we talk about public-sector jobs, we look at the public-sector jobs that have been lost in large numbers in this, it's basically school teachers. Don't think about bureaucrats. It's school teachers. What we've laid off is hundreds of thousands of school teachers.

And we talk about the cuts in public spending that have happened, they are not, you know, some god-awful who-knows-what. It's actually public investment. It's largely fixing potholes and repairing bridges. So, you know, you have this image of these wasteful bureaucrats doing god knows what. What we've actually seen is an incredible drought of basic infrastructure...

FIORINA: And it is a fact...

KRUGMAN: ... and -- and laying off hundreds of thousands of school teachers.

FIORINA: It is a fact that virtually every department in every organization in Washington, D.C., has seen its budget increase for the last 40 years. That money is being paid to hire people. The number of people who are -- of course there are some teachers...

KRUGMAN: Almost -- almost no...

FIORINA: Of course there are some police officers. I'm not saying that.

KRUGMAN: ... the vast bulk of -- the vast bulk of public-sector employees are at the state and local level. They are largely school teachers, plus police officers, plus firefighters.

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: And your notion that it's all these bureaucrats, that's a myth that is used to...

(CROSSTALK)

FIORINA: It's a fact. It's not a myth. It's a fact.

Words have meanings. Fiorina needs to understand that the word "fact" has a specific definition which is not "partisan talking point" or "my opinion". There is little question that there is bloat in the bureacracies of federal offices. But that isn't where the cutting is happening.

A notable aspect of the July employment report is the decline in public-sector employment. In fact, public-sector employment (i.e. federal, state, and local government jobs) declined in 10 of the past 12 months, in sharp contrast to 29 consecutive months of private-sector job growth. Indeed, falling public employment has been among the largest contributors to unemployment in the United States since the end of the Great Recession.

In this month’s employment analysis, The Hamilton Project examines public-sector employment trends over the last three decades and finds that government employment contracted, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the population, during the Great Recession and throughout the current recovery.

Additionally, we report on the results of a new analysis that finds that the cuts in public school teachers are projected to reduce the future earnings of today’s students by more than five times as much as the current budget savings.[..]

Total government (i.e., the sum of state, local, and federal) employment has decreased by over 580,000 jobs since the end of the recession, the largest decrease in any sector since the recovery began in July 2009. State and local governments, faced with tough choices imposed by the confluence of balanced-budget requirements, falling tax revenues, and greater demand for public services, have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, and other workers.

[..]In raw numbers, the largest cuts were to teachers, but of these occupations, the largest percentage decline was among emergency responders.

Transcripts below the fold:

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I hate the analogy that Lindsey Graham and his deficit-scold buddies use -- that America is moments away from becoming Greece if we don’t Fix The Debt © now. It’s good for fear mongering to destroy our social safety nets, but not much else. But after seeing the Internation Monetary Fund implore Great Britain to ease off its austerity program so their economy could heal, I had a little change of heart.

See, one of the only reasons why many countries in Europe have suffered so much after the financial collapse has been because, instead of turning towards Keynesian policies that Paul Krugman has begged for, they’ve embraced the Conservative principles that the UK’s Cameron touted. And that decision ushered in very painful austerity measures upon the people of their nations. The effects of those decisions has been a non-existent financial recovery to their economy and an accompanying nightmare to their population.

“The IMF has never been wildly enthusiastic about Osborne's tough austerity plan for the British economy and has been saying for at least a year that the Treasury should ease off if recovery falters. But up until now it has tended to avoid telling Osborne that his policy is failing.

No longer, it appears. "We said that if things look bad at the beginning of 2013 – which they do – then there should be a reassessment of fiscal policy", Blanchard said.

Fiscal policy involves changes to tax and public spending, and Blanchard noted that the chancellor has the perfect opportunity "to take stock and make adjustments" in the March budget, due in less than two months.”

So in a way, Graham is right -- only his formula is wrong. If we don’t want to become Greece (which can't happen, anyway), we should never, ever consider austerity measures or conservative principles. How quickly the world forgets that it was under a conservative George Bush presidency that the global economy collapsed. Why should we ever turn to his acolytes' beliefs to fix the problem now?

I really enjoyed watching Paul Krugman on Morning Joe today, responding to the paid deficit hawkery of Very Serious People Ed Rendell and Richard Haas. (Watch for the return of the invisible bond market vigilantes!) He talked about why there's no good reason to cut spending during a depression, and explained in detail why the deficit isn't an urgent problem.

Ed "Fix The Debt" Rendell said the best way to stimulate the economy was to get the debt under control.

"Have you been living in the same country I'm in these past five years?" Krugman retorted, saying the deficit is far down on his list of things to worry about.

In response, Mika gasped and said, "I feel like we're talking about climate change! My God!" (What a dope.) Krugman said that was a destructive comparison, and explained why. But I doubt she listened.*

I especially liked it when he responded to Joe Scarborough: "How many times do people like these have to be wrong and people like me have to be right?"

Remember, Paul: Ignorance can be fixed. Stupidity is forever. And speaking of, the guest following you was... Marsha Blackburn, the Republican mall publicist from Tennesse. Because in the corporate media, knowledge followed by insanity is ... "balance"!

*It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair.