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There are so few people I actually admire these days, and one of them continues to be Paul Krugman. Put him on a panel with a bunch of right-wing talking heads, and he's usually going to be the only person who nails them on their zombie talking points. Like this morning, on This Week With George Stephanopoulos, when he put corporatist robot Carly Fiorina, George "His Hair Was Perfect" Will, and David "If Only We Could Slash Social Security" Walker in their places.
If you watch, you'll see Krugman's trademark move: He looks off to one side as if he's so exasperated, he can't even bring himself to look at someone who's so stupid - or so careless with the truth.
Today, he did three very important things. He called out Caroly Fiorina on her made-up "data shows" that people leave states with high taxes, firmly rebutted David Walker's contention that the new Social Security report proves the program is in trouble and need of overhaul, and he completely destroys George Will's vastly uninformed and careless recommendation that Social Security be indexed to life expectancy.
Obviously, he doesn't take Fiorina seriously - and neither should you. She keeps making sh*t up: She says "data shows" and then lies. Krugman just batted her away, like a cat with a mouse. Then he explained to Walker (as if Walker didn't already know) that all the Social Security report showed is that, like the rest of the country, the bad economy is affecting Social Security. (Walker, in case you didn't know it, is Pete Peterson's chief lackey and the person "centrists" keep pushing as a third-party candidate for president. His latest vehicle, Comeback America, is another version of America's Townhall, whose purpose was to build popular support for cutting Social Security and Medicare.)
And then, after prissy blueblood Will lectured that Social Security was created during a time when retirement averaged two years, and now it was closer to 20, proving that since people were living much longer and we needed to index payments to life expectancy, Krugman just knocked it out of the park.
No, it's only the upper income population that's living longer, he said. And this just goes back to the issues of income inequality.
