Can we replace George Will with Paul Krugman on This Week?

In case you missed it, George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s This Week, had a brief media roundtable discussion featuring some entertaining debate between conservative pundit George Will, Newsweek’s international editor Fareed Zakaria, and New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman.

It was a treat to see Krugman on television, which is not his favorite medium. Nevertheless, once he got comfortable, Krugman seemed to forget he was on national television and made plain just how insipid George Will’s defense of the Bush administration is.

Will was taking his usual stance, defending the White House’s incompetence on the economy. In this instance, Will was expressing bewilderment at those who believe the economy is “sluggish,” and explaining how impressed he is that GDP growth was 2.4 percent last year.

Zakaria, who seemed reluctant to burst poor Will’s bubble, said, “Unemployment is going up every week, George.” Will wouldn’t hear of it. “Still at 5.8 percent,” he shot back.

Krugman couldn’t take it, telling Will, “That’s a meaningless number.” When Stephanopoulos asked why, Krugman put his professor hat on.

“Because for reasons we don’t understand a very large number of people are dropping out of the labor force,” Krugman said. “The right number to look at is job growth which has been negative. You know, we’ve lost 2.2 million jobs since early 2001. Almost 500,000 of those in the last two months. You know, [Will] may say GDP is growing. The guy who lost his job six months ago and can’t find another one doesn’t care what GDP is doing. He cares what’s happening to the job market and the job market is steadily deteriorating. Mysteriously, that’s not showing up in the measured unemployment brief but you look at what happening and you discover that’s not because jobs are growing, it’s because more and more people are dropping out of the, are saying when they’re asked have you been looking for a job in the last two weeks, they say no, I can’t find one.”

Will, desperate to respond to the lesson, said, “If you’re gonna stipulate that the numbers coming from the government are meaningless then we have trouble.”

Yeah, that’s a good comeback. You want to praise Bush for a 5.8% unemployment rate, which is still almost a 25% increase over Clinton’s rate, and Krugman explains how and why you’re full of it. Krugman didn’t say government numbers are meaningless, he said when considering a thorough examination of unemployment in this country, you need to look at more than just the 5.8% rate.

Which leads me to wonder, why does Will have a weekly gig on this show while Krugman gets so few bookings? It seems like the two should be reversed.

In any event, Krugman was kind enough to expand on the employment issue in his Times column today.

While he was generous enough to avoid further embarrassing George Will by mentioning him by name, he did explain why unemployment is not likely to get any better under Bush’s tax cut plan.

As Krugman explained it, Bush’s claim of creating over a million new jobs with more tax cuts for the wealthy is based on nothing but wishful thinking, and if the administration was serious about job creation, we’d look at investing more, not cutting spending to make room for more tax cuts.

“[A]s a nation we’re about to reduce spending on basic needs like education, health care and infrastructure by at least $100 billion, maybe more,” Krugman said. “And these spending cuts — the result of the fiscal crisis of the states — amount to a job destruction program bigger than any likely positive effects of the Bush tax cut.”

In other words, since Bush took office, over 2 million jobs have been eliminated. Every month, the employment market deteriorates a bit more. Bush is counting on new jobs being created by offering wealthy Americans more tax breaks. Yet, while that’s occurring, states are experiencing the worst fiscal crises in generations, leading to cuts in countless industries and more people getting laid off.

If Bush wanted to help get America working again, he’d help address the states’ crises, which is where so many of the jobs are being lost in the first place.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted recently that there “are now fewer jobs in the labor market than at any other point in the current downturn,” as the overall number of jobs has dipped to a 40-month low.

I don’t care how many countries Bush decides to invade; he’ll have trouble winning re-election unless people start going back to work. Since WWII, every president, no matter how difficult the economic times have been, enjoyed a net gain in jobs created during their term in office (Clinton created 22 million, a record for any single presidential administration in history, but I digress…).

Bush, so far, has a net loss of 2 million jobs. That means, unless 2 million jobs are created in the next year and a half, Bush will be the first since Hoover to achieve a net employment loss. Will he dare ask the nation, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago”?