Another dynamite find by Verum Serum, on an endless mission to expose liberal doublespeak about what the public option would mean in practice. First clip is from two years ago, the second clip — declaring the arguments against the public option to be “sheer nonsense” — from last weekend. My only quibble with VS is that they seem to think there’s some dissembling here by Krugman. But there’s no contradiction: He’d clearly love to see ObamaCare metastasize into socialized medicine, ergo any arguments against that happening are nonsense. Here he is in the Times just a few days ago:
The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
Evidently, for Krugman, his own argument circa 2007 that it might lead inexorably to a government takeover of health insurance isn’t an argument “against” the public option. Nor, I guess, is the fact that ObamaCare might land us another trillion or two deeper in the hole. Remember, this is the guy who basically shrugged at the news yesterday that the 10-year deficit projection would be 30 percent higher than thought. Exit question via Ace: “Will Krugman ever address this major controversy in which he appears to occupy a central and dispositive role?”
