Night of the Living Dead

Exactly!

by Paul Krugman
December 16, 2010, 1:32 pm
Decade of the Living Dead

Barry Ritholtz expresses amazement at the way the Fannie-Freddie-CRA lie — the claim that gubmint bureaucrats forced all those poor bankers into making bad loans — not only persists, but seems to be growing in influence.

But this story is hardly unique. Ever since I began writing for the Times — and probably before, but I wasn’t paying so much attention then — I’ve been struck over and over again by the unkillability of zombie lies.

I mean, supply-side economics should have been killed by the Clinton years: he raised taxes on the rich, everyone on the right predicted catastrophe, and what followed was 8 years of rapid growth and surging revenues, with the budget actually moving into surplus for the first time in three decades. But no: the right interpreted all the good stuff as a lagged effect of the 1981 tax cut (which meant that LBJ deserved credit for Morning in America, but who’s counting?)

Or consider the California electricity crisis of 2001-2002. Years after we actually had tapes in which Enron traders could be heard telling power plants to shut down, news reports continued to repeat the conservative line that it was all about excessive regulation that wouldn’t let the power companies build capacity — with no mention at all of the market manipulation.

Something similar is happening on the foreign policy front; how likely is it that a random news article on the march to war in Iraq will actually describe what we know actually happened, as opposed to offering a whitewashed version? And so on and so on.

Put it this way: I’ve been rereading George Orwell’s Looking Back at the Spanish War, and it feels familiar.