A Message to Paul Krugman

I have sent the following to Paul Krugman, through The New York Times' web mail system. I told him that I would post his here, and I have pledged that any response will be posted promptly, verbatim and without comment. (Please note that The Times website says that delivery of emails may be delayed.)

Mr. Krugman,

I have been a fan of yours for years. However, your attacks on Barack Obama--which have grown into a vendetta--have greatly diminished my respect for you.

You began by attacking Sen. Obama's call for steps to assure the financial foundation of Social Security, and implied that he was giving aid and comfort to those who want to privatize it. To the contrary, Barack Obama has always been clear that he opposes privatization. His proposal to deal with the obligations that Social Security and Medicare entail is both the most liberal and the fairest of any Democratic candidate: he has called for raising the ceiling on the payroll tax base from its present $97,000. He has accompanied this with a proposal for a refundable credit against the first $500 person of payroll taxes--a measure that would at least reduce regressive effect of that most regressive of federal levies. (More about that proposal below.)

You then attacked Mr. Obama's healthcare proposal in no fewer than three of your valuable columns, although you admitted that "there is a huge divide between Republicans and Democrats on health care, and the Obama plan — although weaker than the Edwards or Clinton plans — is very much on the Democratic side of that divide." (Dec. 7, 2007.) Your essential disagreement with the Senator was stated fully in the first of these articles: you believe that mandated insurance is necessary and he does not. Fair enough. Is that difference so vital that you needed to re-state it three times over a period of a bit more than two weeks?

You also criticized Sen. Obama for saying that he would be ready to sit down and talk to interests such as the health insurers. Do you really believe that the insurers, hospital chains and physicians' organizations can be kept out of the national debate over health insurance? Would you also keep unions and consumer groups out of that debate? Such an approach smacks of the Clinton attempt to write a national health insurance proposal behind closed doors. We all know how well that went.

Last week, you described Mr. Obama's response to the looming economic crisis as "disreputable." The proposal you referred to was the one I mentioned above, to rebate payroll taxes to working Americans. I'm not an economist, but that sounds like an effective stimulus to me: it would put money in the pockets of those who will spend it. The idea is certainly not disreputable. While you heaped opprobrium on the Obama proposals, you nowhere suggested that they would not work, nor even that they would be less effective in stimulating the economy than the plans of Sens. Edwards or Clinton. Given your credentials as an economist, I conclude from your omission that, in fact, Mr. Obama's plan would work as well as those of the other Democrats.

While criticizing Sen. Obama's stimulus proposal, you have been notably silent on Mr. Bush's, which really is disreputable. Given that it is becoming clear that the President's people are trying to stampede Congress into quick action as a way to obtain measures that will favor the wealthy and powerful, I suggest that you would do well to turn your guns on that proposal.

In your most recent column, you attacked Sen. Obama's remarks about Ronald Reagan. While I hold no brief for Mr. Reagan (I regard him as the worst President in our history, until the present incumbent) and agree that the Senator's comments were ill-advised--because they opened him to attacks like yours--what Sen. Obama said was true. Mr. Reagan did, indeed, offer a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing" in the bleak Carter years; indeed, President Carter said much the same thing when he spoke of a national "malaise." In your column, you conveniently assumed that Mr. Obama was applauding Reganomics. His words, however, do not say that. (As an aside, the "conservative editorial board" to which you asserted that Mr. Obama was speaking endorsed Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.)

We now know that Sen. Clinton described Mr. Regan by saying: “When he had those big tax cuts and they went too far, he oversaw the largest tax increase. He could call the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and then negotiate arms-control agreements. He played the balance and the music beautifully.” May we expect your next column to take her on for being so favorable to the late president?

You are the master of your column (within the editorial guidelines of the paper). You are free to support or oppose any candidate or policy. The way you have been using your power lately has, however, not enhanced but reduced your credibility.

Thank you for your attention.