Paul Krugman on the notion that Barack Obama blew it by not focusing more on jobs:
So when you say Obama should have focused more, what policies are you talking about? A bigger stimulus? As far as I can tell, almost no pundits are saying that. So what other concrete policies do they have in mind? I have never gotten an answer.
The notion seems to be that if Obama had spent the past 20 months going around with furrowed brow, saying, “I’m focused on the economy”, this would have (a) somehow created jobs (b) made people feel better about 9.6 percent unemployment.
Krugman, of course, has been vocal about the fact that Obama should have pushed for a bigger stimulus. Others have pointed at the foreclosure mess and suggested that a better-designed HAMP would have helped the economy. But Krugman is right: the actual people who keep claiming that Obama needed to focus more on jobs haven’t generally gotten on either of these bandwagons. They just seem to think there’s some kind of magic that would have either improved things or, at least, cheered everyone up even though they didn’t have actual jobs. But what?
