It’s understandable Krugman would be defensive of Gruber. He’s cited him many times. And when Rahm Emanuel touted “progressive” support for the Senate bill in the Wall Street Journal, noting that “what you’re seeing is the progressive backlash against the progressive backlash,” he pointed to a Krugman column as well as “another coming from National Journal writer Ronald Brownstein pressing for passage of the Senate health bill.”

SENATOR DORGAN: The amendment we are offering, a bipartisan amendment dealing with the price of prescription drugs, is a very important amendment. We are going to get our vote on that, but then there is also going to be a vote on a poison pill amendment that nullifies it. It says if you pass the second amendment, it means nothing happens and prescription drug prices keep going through the roof.

The Democrats completely messed up the politics and policy of the stimulus bill. They let a group of “60th-vote ‘centrists’” ruin it on a policy level. A failure to pass good policy, combined with a failure to properly explain and defend the stimulus bill, made it bad politics. Now, for political and policy reasons, Democrats [...]

This health care reform bill is so very far from perfect. AFL-CIO President Trumka savages Democrats for the excise tax. Paul Krugman hits FDL for reports on Jonathan Gruber’s conflict of interests. Jane responds to Krugman. The idea that taxing”cadillac” health plans will “bend the cost curve” is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

If the stated policy goal is to tax very generous employer- provided health care plans, the excise tax in the Senate bill is a terrible way to achieve this policy goal.

Krugman owes everyone an explanation as to why he thinks it’s okay to smear someone fairly investigating a legitimate controversy in defense of a friend who mislead people for months, who stood on the sidelines mutely while the White House promoted his work as objective verification of their own policies in a self-generated validation loop.

And he owes Marcy Wheeler an apology.

To show how far the debate is from the perfect, let’s outline what the perfect would look like and contrast and compare against the rest of the spectrum from very good to bad.

OMB director Peter Orszag and MIT economists Jonathan Gruber are both very smart, successful individuals. While I may not agree with them on every policy, that does not mean I don’t respect their intelligence. Both have knowledge and perspective to add to the health care debate. The problem is that it turns out they have [...]

Back in November, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, ripped the US Chamber of Commerce for shopping around for an economist critical of health care reform. The Chamber was offering $50,000 for the services of a “respected economist.” “Now I know the price for a tenured economist,” Rahm Emanuel chuckled. “I’ve come to the conclusion [...]

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber has, for a long time, been the go-to guy for people who want to defend the Senate bill. (Today Sen. John Kerry has an article on the Huffington Post defending the excise tax in which he quotes only one economist, Jonathan Gruber.) Gruber does not just support the Senate bill, he [...]