Some good Krugman

This Age of Bubbles - NYTimes.com

I've been forgetting to check in on Paul Krugman.  (How I wish he lived here for some clear and erudite commentary on what passes for economic policy in the Coalition now!)

The column at the link above notes the renewed economic worries in India and Brazil.  He doesn't think it will cause a world meltdown, but sounds slightly nervous.  (He expressed worries about China recently too.  From a lay man's point of view, the publicity that it has recently had with its "ghost" empty cities has certainly made me think - surely this is a bad sign.)

But he writes with common sense on most topics he touches.  Have a look at his post on Microsoft and Apple, for example.  I feel pretty much the same.

He's also taken delight in noting that changes to Singaporean health system  will no longer make it the free market poster child for health that US Republicans used to claim it was.

As for his summary of the current state of American politics:

If you haven’t been reading the political blogs much — say, Greg Sargent — you may not have a sense of just how dire the political environment is. But here’s the situation. You have a Republican base that truly believes that guaranteed health insurance is the work of the devil. Meanwhile, there’s a Republican majority in the House that owes its position not to broad popular support — Democrats actually got more votes in 2012 — but to a district map that concentrates Democrats in a minority of districts, which in turn means that most Rs are more afraid of Tea Party challengers than outraged independents.

And the debt ceiling looms, with many ideologues assuring the base that Obama can be bullied into gutting his main achievement, which he won’t.

Everyone seems to assume that this will be worked out somehow, but nobody has even a halfway plausible story about how this will be done. Default looks like a real risk.

How depressing...