Paul Krugman at Netroots Nation 2012 this Saturday morning: If You Don’t Know Someone Suffering Financially, You Must Be A Romney:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Saturday morning called the current state of the U.S. economy “incredibly awful.”

“If you don’t know multiple people who are suffering, then you must be living in a very rarefied environment,” he said in a brief address to the Netroots Nation conference. “You must be maybe a member of the Romney clan, or something.”

Krugman is out with a new book, “End This Depression Now!”, and he told the progressive gathering that the country’s economic problems are solvable.

“None of this has to be happening. We didn’t have a plague of locusts, we were not hit by a tsunami, there wasn’t some act of God that created this terrible situation. It was acts of man.”

Krugman, who has seen an advance copy of his newspaper’s review of “End This Depression,” dinged the Times’ book review editor. [...]

Krugman concluded that Americans are living under the tyranny of “very serious people” — people like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, he said. “Solving this depression is not fundamentally an economic problem, it’s a political problem.”

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Our friends over at Media Matters have been following this line of attack by George Will for some time now, so this is nothing new. Here's Will on this Sunday's This Week with Christiane Amanpour continuing to trash the New Deal:

AMANPOUR: You talked about what the government should be doing. So let me ask you, one of the big issues obviously that we have been debating all year is election. This election is jobs, the jobs crisis. There are something like nearly 23 million people who are either unemployed, underemployed or out of the work force. And of course during the Great Depression the government created big programs to get people back to work. Why shouldn't they do right now? Why shouldn't they be that kind of...

WILL: First of all, because it didn't work during the depression. The cardinal aim of the New Deal was to put the country back to work. Unemployment never came below 14 percent until we geared up to be the arsenal of democracy in the Second World War. We have had a remarkably clear test under the Obama administration. They said, pass the stimulus and by 2011, the economy would be growing at 4% and unemployment would be 7.1 percent and falling.

I don't fault the president for having his economic projections wrong. This is a complicated society. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of your liberal friends was once said, that the purpose of economic projections is to make astrology to look respectable.

I don't fault the president for this. I fault the president for thinking that society is transparent and easy to regulate. Just as I don't fault the president for making a slew of horrible investments in green energy and all the rest -- Solyndra and other companies. I don't fault him for that, because no one expects the political class to be good at disposing money in the most productive ways.

Here's more from Media Matters on Will's prior remarks:

Will repeats tired myth that the New Deal failed

George Will Continues His Campaign To Repeal The 20th Century

Asserting FDR "waged ... a jihad against private enterprise," Hume falsely claimed "everybody agrees ... that the New Deal failed"

Conservatives cherry-pick 1930s unemployment figures in continued assault on New Deal

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The Nation's Chris Hayes filled in for Ed Schultz and did a good job of calling for everyone who is sick to death of business as usual in Washington D.C. to be demanding better leadership from our elected officials when our country is in crisis.

HAYES: House Minority Leader John Boehner unleashed a torrent of attacks on President Obama and the Democrats in an interview with "The Pittsburgh Tribune Review" yesterday. He also explained why Tea Party nation is so angry at the majority party. Boehner said, quote, "They are snuffing out America that I grew up in. Right now we’ve got more Americans engaged in their government than at any time in our history. There’s a political rebellion brewing, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it since 1776."

Boehner went on to rail against what the - what he calls Obamacare and promised to repeal the law, if he gets his hand on the speaker’s gavel. Boehner criticized the president for overreacting to the oil spill in the gulf because of his moratorium on deepwater drilling. Minority leader also thinks Congress overreached when House and Senate negotiators reached a tentative deal on financial reform. Boehner said, quote, "This is killing an ant with a nuclear weapon", end quote.

Now, Boehner isn’t alone in attempting to minimize the financial crisis. Fact of the matter is as soon as the bankers and the big shots were in the clear, when the bonuses started flowing on Wall Street and politicians could hit their fund-raising goals again, the establishment suddenly lost that sense of panicked urgency they had when in the fall of 2008 it looked like the entire crown jewel of American capitalism was swirling around the drain.

Let’s keep this in perspective. The baroque Ponzi scheme in which Wall Street engaged precipitated a recession that has, as I speak to you right now, left eight million people without jobs, 8.4 million people without jobs, three million homes foreclosed on, and as of 2008 at least a million more people living in poverty. And just today scared consumers are raising more worries of a double-dip recession.

The folks that number among those millions don’t think this recession is just an ant or a bump in the road. For them, it is an existential crisis, the death of life dreams. For John Boehner and so many of his colleagues this doesn’t amount to that big a deal because it’s not their ox being gored. I live in Washington which has one of the strongest regional economies in the country, and I can tell you the boom times are back.

The only way to wake the American elite establishment out of its complacency about the slow motion disaster of the great recession is for the people getting hammered by it to organize and to interrupt this ruling class idol, to remind the people in power that the crisis isn’t over and the real danger isn’t overreaction, it is the sin of forgetting, the threat of failing to use this moment to fix a dangerously broken economy.

Amen brother. Chris has done a good job with filling in for Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz even if he is maybe a little stiff in front of the camera when he's hosting a show rather than being just a guest. It would not break my heart if MSNBC was prepping him for a spot in their daily lineup. He's an excellent writer and on the right side of the issues for progressives. He'll get better in front of the camera if given a chance IMHO.

Lawrence O'Donnell is going to get an evening spot on MSNBC. I would love to see Hayes replace any of the news models that make up the majority of their daytime coverage.

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From The Cafferty File Is U.S. entering a depression?:

Forget all the talk about an economic recovery - the U.S. just might be headed in the opposite direction.

Paul Krugman - who has a Nobel Prize in economics - writes in the New York Times that he fears we are in the early stages of a depression.

Krugman says a failure of policy is to blame - that it's a mistake for governments around the world to raise taxes and cut spending at this time. Krugman says nations should be spending more to stimulate the economy.

And, at the end of the day - it is the unemployed and their families who will pay the high cost of this depression. Krugman writes about the "tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again."

Speaking of the unemployed - almost one million Americans are losing their unemployment benefits because the Senate failed to extend the deadline.

The bill didn't get the 60 votes needed to pass because lawmakers are looking for ways to put the brakes on skyrocketing deficits.

The same bill also contained another $24 billion for Medicaid funding for various states. And since they won't be getting that money right now, they will be forced to cut hundreds of millions of dollars, on top of what they've already cut.

It's getting very ugly out there.

Despite the Obama administration crowing about the so-called recovery summer - 78% of Americans say the economy is still in a recession according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Some recovery.

Here’s my question to you: Is the U.S. entering a depression?

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George W. Bush's former campaign director appeared on NBC Sunday to defend his record on the economy. According to Karen Hughes, Bush rescued the economy from collapse.

Speaking about President Barack Obama's successes, Mark Halperin praised the current president's handling of the economy. "I think an extraordinary job as John said under difficult circumstances. He managed the economic crisis, kept the world from going into depression," said Halperin.

But Hughes quickly took objection to Halperin's assessment. "I have to disagree with you, Mark, about rescuing the economy," she said. "I think that happened before President Bush left office when they took the action that they did on TARP."

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Countdown's Worst Persons segment for Oct. 5, 2009 with winner Rep. Paul Broun. Runners up George Will and Rush Limbaugh.

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John Ensign on Hardball still blaming Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act for the economic crisis and claiming that government spending didn't get us out of the depression. I think Ensign and his buddy Boehner need to spend a little less time in the tanning bed thinking of new ways to attempt to revise history and take cheap political shots at entities they don't like and a little more time actually trying to get this country back on track and out of the mess we're in.

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From The Cafferty File Dec. 4, 2008:

A top executive at Chrysler, Vice Chairman Jim Press, is warning that the failure of just one of the Big Three automakers could drive the U.S. economy into a depression.

The CEOs of Chrysler, Ford and GM were back on Capitol Hill today asking for $34 billion in aid, just two weeks after they asked for $25 billion and were shot down.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally quoted an estimate from Goldman Sachs during his testimony that said the failures of the three companies could cost the U.S. economy up to $1 trillion.

Sure the companies need cash. And sure they directly provide jobs to 355,000 workers. And an additional 4.5 million jobs in related industries. But there are real questions about whether we would be throwing good money after bad. Detroit has failed to keep up with a changing industry for years, despite the handwriting that was clearly put on the wall by Toyota and Honda, among others. American cars come with legacy costs unrivaled anywhere in the industry. Sales figures released this week were terrible. GM down 41 percent, Ford down 31 percent. Congress is grappling with whether the cure is worse than the disease.

Here’s my question to you: Will the loss of any one of the Big Three auto companies lead to a depression?

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