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Recessions

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The Krugman-bashing on Morning Joe continued unabated Wednesday, following Joe Scarborough and Paul Krugman's debate the other night on Charlie Rose's show. It seems the right has been looking for countries to prop up to prove that their calls for more austerity measures in the United States are not going to harm the economy and they've found at least one in the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia.

Scarborough started things off in the clip above by writing off our current economic circumstances as just another "period of deleveraging" where the United States needs to get its fiscal house in order with absolutely no reference to the fact that we should not be taking a series of booms and busts as the norm, or the part that deregulation and the dismantling all of the protections that were put in place following the Great Depression to attempt to prevent these types of cycles from happening again have played.

After Scarborough pointed out the fact that Americans and particularly young people are not longer racking up debt, but are also not spending and pumping money into the economy, his guest and CNBC regular Miles Nadal then moved onto the Krugman bashing:

NADAL: So when you say, are you positive on the economy, I'm positive in a cautious kind of way, but as Joe articulated on The Charlie Rose Show, which I thought was really a terrific debate, there are things on the horizon that are very scary. And I thought Paul Krugman's perspective was kind of, a little frightening in the sense that he didn't see any possibility of any Black Swan on anything that's happening and if you talk to any informed business person, that's not possible that you could completely eliminate the probability that nothing, including this multi-trillion dollar deficit would have no impact.

And as we articulated in the green room, nobody could run a company or a home the way the government is running things.

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Ed Schultz spoke to journalist David Cay Johnston this Friday about what America needs to do to keep adding more jobs to our economy, the importance of continuing the extended unemployment benefits, and the Republicans' refusal to help the problem by passing President Obama's jobs bill.

As Johnston noted, Republicans love to complain about "uncertainty" creating problems with the economy, but par for the course, they're generally the ones causing it.

SCHULTZ: We told you at the top of the show, Republicans are dragging their feet to get a tax cut deal with the American people. Those Republican delays are putting our economic recovery, I think, in some serious neighborhood, dangerous, very dangerous.

But the good news is though, the latest employment numbers came out this morning. The economy added 146,000 jobs in the month of November. The unemployment rate hit a four-year low. It inched down to 7.7 percent.

Here's the bad news. America lost another 7000 manufacturing jobs last month. Overall the job numbers are better than analysts predicted, but republicans refuse to compromise on policies which will bring back even more jobs next year. They are risking our nation's economic recovery. Here's how Speaker John Boehner's explanation today.

BOEHNER: The risk the President wants us to take, increasing tax rates, will hit the many small businesses that produce 60 to 70 percent of the the new jobs in our country. That's the whole issue here.

SCHULTZ: Once again, it's all theory from Boehner. No guarantee on that. But Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi says the problem goes beyond the fiscal cliff debate.

PELOSI: Our economy is moving forward, but it could be growing at a faster rate if the Republican leadership had taken up and passed some of President Obama’s job initiatives including the American Jobs Act and had passed the middle income tax cut.

SCHULTZ: So, let's cut to the chase. One of those Congressional members is lying. Either the Republicans are right on cutting taxes on small businesses will add jobs or the President's stimulus policies are fueling the economic recovery in this country.

Joining me tonight to sort out the facts, David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of "The Fine Print." Let's start with the job growth. Unemployment hit rock bottom near the beginning of the -- under the Bush administration. You can see this right here. This is of course the changing of the color here when President Obama took over in January of '09. Who is responsible for this turn around?

JOHNSTON: Oh, absolutely the President and it would be a better turn around if the Republicans had allowed a bigger stimulus. We would have many, many more jobs if we had had a bigger stimulus.

SCHULTZ: You would make the case we didn't spend enough on the economy?

JOHNSTON: Not only did we not spend enough, but we wasted 40 percent of it on tax cuts for small business, which is inherently savings and not stimulus. It was a real policy mistake.

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