Paul Krugman weighs in on Bernanke, Obama, economy, and health care (podcast)

Very wide ranging interview that generally supports actions taken by Bernanke from NPR's "Here and Now"

I've paraphrased some comments:

About the economy: "we are not in heaven or hell, we are in purgatory"

"the reason we haven't had another great depression is in large part because federal spending has continued, at the expense of deficits"

"If we had not had the stimulus, we would now be seeing the economy still falling as fast as it was in the first quarter... and be in a total panic"

About Obama: "good things about Obama, he's very smart and very calm.... but he needs to turn us away from this right wing "the market is always right, government is always bad" ideology, and he has not done that because that is not what he believes, which in from my point of view is unfortunate"

About health care: "all proposals are deficit neutral.... public option does two things, it provides competition to private insurance that have pretty much a monopoly in most states,... and strait simple government plan will have lower costs"

"Many people demonstrating..elderly on medicare.. don't realize we actually have a largely government run health care system already..."

"Pretty much a constant flood of misinformation coming from the right, not fact checked by the media, then people get a distorted impression"

"The expensive are already covered....people uninsured right now are largely young, and would be relatively cheap to insure"

'amazing to me that the same Republicans who were out to savagely cut medicare a few years ago, are now saying the democrats are planning to take away your medicare and send you to the death panels"

"medicare has vastly different spending throughout the country..all we are trying to do here is provide guidance and not degrade senior's lives with unnecessary procedures"

"notion that the market is the solution is a pure fantasy driven by ideology"

http://www.hereandnow.org/2009/08/rundown-825/

job back, because it makes little sense to me. I guess the market should settle this?