Bonum Certa Men Certa

New York Times Debt Propaganda

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer. Also available in Gemini.

The New York Times Spins Up the KrugmanBot3000 to China-bash.



The crooked New York Times has made the KrugmanBot3000 write another article.



This time, the alleged Mr. Krugman, if indeed he is a person at all, and not just a Large Language Model for the Inner Party, claims that Chinese debt levels are unsustainable.



While the KrugmanBot3000 has unwaveringly said that the American federal debt that keeps growing and is about $33 trillion dollars right now is “manageable” and even recently blew off the fact that interest rates are rising and the interest on the national debt is going to crowd out more and more of the federal budget.



In fact, this will force deep and unpopular cuts to everything, including Social Security and Medicare, because there is no appetite to raise taxes on the rich.



The Democrats, which the KrugmanBot3000 is a tool of, did not repeal the part of Trump’s tax bill that gave the wealthy elite their bailouts, even though the debt explodes and there is no end in sight to the misery being suffered by the American people.



But in a China-bashing (and paywalled) article, the KrugmanBot3000 claims that Chinese debt is different, somehow.



I’m not confident enough in my understanding of China to judge whether it will manage to contain its Minsky moment, the point at which everyone suddenly realizes that unsustainable debt is, in fact, unsustainable. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone — including Chinese officials — knows the answer to that question.



But I think we can answer a more conditional question: If China does have a 2008-style crisis, will it spill over in a major way to the rest of the world, the United States in particular? And there the answer is pretty clearly no. Big as China’s economy is, America has remarkably little financial or trade exposure to China’s problems.

-Paul Krugman (KrugmanBot3000)


Now, I want you to stop and think how stupid that quote is from top to bottom.



So, American debt, which is horrific, is sustainable. EU and UK debt is horrific, but sustainable, Japanese debt is almost 300% of their annual economic output which is truly awful, but sustainable.



But Chinese debt is unsustainable and will push them over the edge into a massive economic failure? Oh boy. Maybe if they hurry up and be our allies, they too can have “sustainable (horrific) debt”. 😛



Then the alleged Krugman continues, by claiming that America, which is basically pretty much fully dependent on China for, oh Jesus. Have you ever LOOKED at the country of origin on anything at Walmart?



“Very little financial or trade exposure.”



Well, other than making almost everything you buy here, or increasingly what people set fire to the store and steal here because they can no longer afford Dollar Tree, after Bubba Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and put millions of Americans out of work (and put some cigars in Monica Lewinsky) and got “Free Trade” going, and other than owning so much of the US debt that they pretty much could ruin us by just letting it roll off the books and refusing to buy more “Treasury Securities”, sure. Awesome Possum.



I ran into a video the other day, should have saved it, about how the American media has been publishing Doom, Gloom, and Boom articles claiming China will come down like a sack of bricks in short order, for over 50 years.



As the United States has become an old age colony floating around in debt and Fentanyl, the shrieking and insistence that there’s no problem with us, only with the Chinese, has only gotten louder.

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