Saturday, December 31, 2011

Krugman about US debt

Paul Krugman on the US national debt: 
"And you don’t have to be a right-winger to acknowledge that yes, very high marginal tax rates act as a disincentive to productive activity. So real GDP may well fall significantly.

This is what I mean when I say that the burden of debt is about incentives, not about having to deliver resources to other people.

Private debt, by the way, creates a different kind of problem: again, it doesn’t directly make us poorer, but it increases our macroeconomic vulnerability.

The general point is that the analogy with a family that owes too much is all wrong. Unfortunately, this dumb analogy dominates our national discourse."

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