This Guy won a Nobel Prize?

Sometimes Krugman comes across as incredibly stupid. In two recent blog posts he says things that strike me as pretty dumb. Here, he says, as he has before, that is is "deeply illogical" to propose a cut in future benefits in social security in order to prevent future cuts in benefits. What he calls "deeply illogical" is what most reasonable people would call "planning." If you know that in twenty years Social Security is going to face a massive shortfall, isn't it wise to make changes now so you avoid a very disruptive, massive cut? If you can change the formula for social security increases so it increases more slowly then there won't be a massive cut all at once. Isn't that what people who create budgets and forecasts are supposed to do? Why is that illogical? If you know you are going to lose your job or suffer a future cut in income, doesn't it make sense to start saving now to prepare? Isn't it better to slow the increase in benefits so people have a long time to prepare rather than suddenly stick them with a cut? Wouldn't any normal, intelligent person realize this?

In this post, he points to a graph that is supposedly a better debunking of the claim that the government growth is out of control. He claims that conservative critics of government are falsely using the temporary spike in government employment to claim that government is growing a lot. However, even ignoring the two spikes in the graph for the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the graph clearly shows the government employment is increasing much more rapidly since 2008. From 2000 to 2008, ignoring the census spike, government employment went from a little under 1.9 million to a little under 2.0 million, an increase of 100,000 jobs. From 2008 to the end of 2010, again ignoring the census spike, government employment went from under 2.0 million to 2.2 million, an increase of a little more than 200,000 jobs. So in three years the government added twice as many jobs as they did over the 8 years between 2000 and 2008. Krugman doesn't even address what the graph plainly shows - a government growing at a must faster pace over the past few years.