Paul Krugman Ironically Asks ‘How Can Voters Be So Ill Informed?’
In his lifetime, Princeton economics professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has published 20 books, over 200 papers, and since the year 2000 two columns a week at the New York Times. Clearly without understanding the irony of his question, the man once accused by the Gray Lady's ombudsman of possessing a “disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers” asked his readers Monday, “How can voters be so ill informed [sic]?”: The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people. That’s the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They’re evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and — surprise — defense. The only thing they clearly want to cut is foreign aid, which most Americans believe, wrongly, accounts for a large share of the federal budget. Pew also asked people how they would like to see states close their budget deficits. Do they favor cuts in either education or health care, the main expenses states face? No. Do they favor tax increases? No. The only deficit-reduction measure with significant support was cuts in public-employee pensions — and even there the public was evenly divided. How can voters be so ill informed [sic]? Readers should note the “[sic]” after informed, as the proper spelling is ill-informed, unless of course one is talking about a medical professional. But the sentences that immediately followed were the real treasures:
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on February 15, 2011. Filed under