Great Moments in Self-Refutation

Rarely does a (at least once-) respectable pundit face-plant as badly as Michael Kinsley re-proving Krugman’s points about austerity mongers while attempting to refute them. While it’s impossible to summarize an argument this incoherent, the key point seems to be that if you can’t tell the difference between Barack Obama and David Cameron (a problem that, admittedly, does afflict a handful of people on the American left) it’s hard to know what opponents of short-term austerity want. But there are many more terrible arguments to be found, and hence I turn things over to DeLong and Drezner.

In addition, it’s worth noting that Kinsley is one of those people who’s been haunted by the specter of inflation for years, and the fact that he’s been consistently wrong doesn’t seem to have taught him anything. And why should it — as he essentially concedes himself, the case for austerity is about overclass morality, not about economics.