Paul the Prognosticator

NYT's Paul Krugman predicts the coming Republican majority in Congress will be a disaster for the country, turning America into hellish place unfit for human habitation.

In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

That's some prediction. So how good is Paul at making predictions about the economy.

Well, two years ago, he was urging the President of the United States not to lowball a stimulus package. What the country needed was a stimulus package that was "twice the size" of anything being contemplated by Congress. A bold and muscular spending spree that would get the economy humming again. So this is what he wrote on Nov. 10, 2008:

So we need a fiscal stimulus big enough to close a 7% output gap. Remember, if the stimulus is too big, it does much less harm than if it’s too small. What’s the multiplier? Better, we hope, than on the early-2008 package. But you’d be hard pressed to argue for an overall multiplier as high as 2.

When I put all this together, I conclude that the stimulus package should be at least 4% of GDP, or $600 billion.

Some voters might recall the president and Democratic Congress took Paul's advice and not only didn't "lowball" the stimulus, they went "big" and threw in an extra $200 billion in spending just to be on the safe side.

And the result? 9.5 percent unemployment, slug, slug, sluggish growth and deficits for as far as the eye can see. That Paul Krugman is really good a predicting things isn't he?

UPDATE: Makes you wonder whether Pat Toomey's idea of a 3-year payroll tax holiday for employers and employees might have made for better results.