As usual, Paul Krugman starts out with a serious attempt at answers before detouring into his current profession. Dr. Krugman used to be an Economist, and a pretty good one too (for whatever that’s worth). Nowadays, he employs his New York Times column as a mouthpiece for really blatant politicking. It isn’t even so much an arm of the Democratic party as it is raw anti-Republican.

That’s too bad because by betraying these instincts he ends up doing so much disservice.

He wrote a column back in September titled Botching the Great Recession. The first part is actually serious analysis; the latter not so much. There was a panic and a big economic contraction, and this one was different from those before. He doesn’t do it, but Krugman comes close to putting quotes around “recession.”

Why was this one so different? It’s a question only some Economists have dared to try and answer. Dr. Krugman intrigues when he says it was the prior bubble. “The really big factor was the bursting of the housing bubble — of which the banking crisis was a symptom.” A lot of what he relies on to justify this view is faulty analysis, however.

Krugman agrees with folks like Ben Bernanke that officials performed admirably during 2008. They weren’t the ones who “botched” the Great “Recession”, apparently (spoiler: it was Republicans who focused on deficits, ruining any attempt at even bigger fiscal profligacy). His simple argument goes like this:

Rapid financial recovery did not, however, produce rapid recovery for the economy as a whole. As the same figure shows, unemployment stayed high for many years; we didn’t return to anything that felt remotely like full employment (leaving aside the question of whether we’re there even now) until late in Obama’s second term.

If Obama had gotten a bigger ARRA or even another one, then recovery had a chance. Rubbish.

The key to his equation hinges on “financial recovery.” In his view, as anyone else, the financial system was healed through the good work of our central bank. Therefore, if the financial system recovered but the economy did not it couldn’t have been the financial system at fault for lack of economic trend afterward. Double rubbish.