"Nobody knows it," says Paul Krugman, "but 2014 was the year of 'Yes, we can' "

"[O]ver the past year, a U.S. government subjected to constant bad-mouthing, constantly accused of being ineffectual or worse, has, in fact, managed to accomplish a lot. On multiple fronts, government wasn't the problem; it was the solution. Nobody knows it, but 2014 was the year of 'Yes, we can.' "

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today, "Tidings of Comfort"

by Ken

"All year," says our Paul in this column reflecting on what he says seemed to him an "unusually subdued" Christmas, "Americans have been bombarded with dire news reports portraying a world out of control and a clueless government with no idea what to do." And yet the reality, he says, is that

if you look back at what actually happened over the past year, you see something completely different. Amid all the derision, a number of major government policies worked just fine — and the biggest successes involved the most derided policies. You’ll never hear this on Fox News, but 2014 was a year in which the federal government, in particular, showed that it can do some important things very well if it wants to.

It's what happens when, alas, control of the national discourse is surrendered to the Right-Wing Noise Machine, which cares only about lies the Noisemakers craft to make them, their masters, and/or their stooges richer, more important, or whatever the hell it is that drives these beasts. Goodness knows we've picked at the "why"s frequently enough. Suffice it to say, for now, that the Lying Liars of the Right have what seem to them ample reasons for dealing only in lies, obfuscations, and delusions. And Paul starts with one that came up in Noah's 2014 Year in Review: the suddenly disappeared crisis that was about to consume the Republic -- "a subject", Paul notes, "that has vanished from the headlines so fast it’s hard to remember how pervasive the panic was just a few weeks ago."

EBOLA!

It was, of course, a panic that was friven if not actually created in large part by the Lying Liars to bolster their election prospects [lots o'links onsite] --

[M]any politicians dismissed the efforts of public health officials to deal with the disease using conventional methods. Instead, they insisted, we needed to ban all travel to and from West Africa, imprison anyone who arrived from the wrong place, and close the border with Mexico. No, I have no idea why anyone thought that last item made sense.

As it turned out, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some early missteps, knew what they were doing, which shouldn’t be surprising: The Centers have a lot of experience in, well, controlling disease, epidemics in particular. And while the Ebola virus continues to kill many people in parts of Africa, there was no outbreak here.

THE ECONOMY

"There’s no question," says Paul, "that recovery from the 2008 crisis has been painfully slow and should have been much faster. In particular, the economy has been held back by unprecedented cuts in public spending and employment."

But the story you hear all the time portrays economic policy as an unmitigated disaster, with President Obama’s alleged hostility to business holding back investment and job creation. So it comes as something of a shock when you look at the actual record and discover that growth and job creation have been substantially faster during the Obama recovery than they were during the Bush recovery last decade (even ignoring the crisis at the end), and that while housing is still depressed, business investment has been quite strong.

What’s more, recent data suggest that the economy is gathering strength — 5 percent growth in the last quarter! Oh, and not that it matters very much, but there are some people who like to claim that economic success should be judged by the performance of the stock market. And stock prices, which hit a low point in March 2009, accompanied by declarations from prominent Republican economists that Mr. Obama was killing the market economy,have tripled since then. Maybe economic management hasn’t been that bad, after all.

"THE HIDDEN-IN-PLAIN-SIGHT TRIUMPH OF OBAMACARE"

As Obamacare finishes up "its first full year of implementation," Paul says,

It’s a tribute to the effectiveness of the propaganda campaign against health reform — which has played up every glitch, without ever mentioning that the problem has been solved, and invented failures that never happened — that I fairly often encounter people, some of them liberals, who ask me whether the administration will ever be able to get the program to work. Apparently nobody told them that it is working, and very well.

In fact, Year 1 surpassed expectations on every front. Remember claims that more people would lose insurance than gained it? Well, the number of Americans without insurance fell by around 10 million; members of the elite who have never been uninsured have no idea just how much positive difference that makes to people’s lives. Remember claims that reform would break the budget? In reality, premiums were far less than predicted, overall health spending is moderating, and specific cost-control measures are doing very well. And all indications suggest that year two will be marked by further success.

ON THE FOREIGN-POLICY FRONT --

"And there’s more," Paul says. On the foreign-policy front, of course, the president has been battered from all directions by Lying Liars and Braying Imbeciles whose claim to superior wisdom is belied by their near-psychotic obliviousness to the realities of every one of the situations they bray about. In spite of which, Paul notes, " at the end of 2014, the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which tries to contain threats like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the Islamic State rather than rushing into military confrontation, is looking pretty good.


"THE COMMON THEME HERE,"

says Paul, is what I put at the top of this post. Though you won't hear it from the Lying Liars or their masters, accomplices, and stooges, "on multiple fronts, government wasn't the problem; it was the solution."

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