Mark it down on your calendar. In his remarks in the roundtable portion of ABC’s This Week program I agreed with almost everything Paul Krugman had to say.
First, on the issue of the NSA’s data collection and mining, Dr. Krugman, paraphrasing Jack Balkin, noted that technology made some level of surveillance state inevitable. The surveillance state could be democratic, gather as little data as was practicable, and be open about what it was gathering. Alternatively, it could be authoritarian, gathering as much data as it could, and be as closed as possible about it. We’re closer to the authoritarian model than the democratic one.
Second, with respect to Friday’s jobs report, after pointing out that the economy had entered a sort of “sour equilibrium”, made very nearly all of the points I made in my post on the subject. Essentially, it was not a good jobs report and characterizing it as such is an act of desperation.
Later in the roundtable he wandered off into the weeds a bit but on the two issues mentioned above he and I are in accord to a remarkable degree.
