Posts
Advance copy of Gen. Petraeus' opening statement to Congress
("Get off my back, a--holes!")
Book claims John McCain called his wife an ugly word
(Hint: It wasn't "progressive.")Obama suffers 'lingering damage' over racist pastor
(Good news for Hillary?)
Hillary adviser Mark Penn 'gelded'?
(More good news!)Obama +9 over Hillary in Gallup Poll
(National numbers are irrelevant in primaries.)Krugman: Food crisis!
("All the fearmongering that fits")Clinton: 'Boycott China'?
(Those illegal donations must be lagging.)
100 Word Fan Fiction: An Unexpected Salutation
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“Ah Hogan, what kept you?” Col Hogan had seen all kinds of prisoner
reactions when the cooler wall opened into the cell but never this. “You
were expecting...
2 hours ago
So why is the Krugman column fearmongering? And I assume that you approve of his position on ag subsidies.
ReplyDeleteKrugman is correct in saying that biofuels -- and especially, the U.S. government's mandates for the use of ethanol -- are bad policy.
ReplyDeleteBut Krugman speaks as if the "food crisis" were caused by a shortage of agricultural land, so that an acre used to grow corn subtracted from the amount of land available to grow rice. This simply isn't so. The earth's land surface is nowhere near its maximum food-production level.
Krugman suggests that the recent protests (not riots) in Argentina were caused by a food shortage; there were not. Rather, the government was seeking to raise taxes on farmers, in a (misguided) effort to solve a fiscal problem.
Krugman is engaged in fearmongering, because he's encouraging a panic reaction to a "food crisis" that doesn't exist, at least as he's described it.
But look on the bright side: If a billion people perish in a global famine, we won't have to hear about the "overpopulation crisis" for a while.