NYT Economist: If We Don't Re-Elect Obama, We'll End up Like Greece

If Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wins in November, we had better prepare for some Greek-style economic ruin, thus saith left-leaning New York Times blogger and noted Keynesian economist Paul Krugman.

"I think there's a real chance that [Romney will] manage to pursue a policy in the first couple of years that simultaneously blows up the deficit and depresses the economy," Krugman said during an interview on HuffPost Live Wednesday.

"Tax cuts for the rich, who won't spend them, and slash spending for the poor and the middle class, who will be forced to cut back. And so we end up managing to have a simultaneous deficit explosion and double-dip recession," he added.

Krugman wasn’t finished. The Nobel-Prize winning economist (I know, right?), had much more to say about the possible economic repercussion of voting for Gov. Romney.

"[R]epublican policies … are much more likely to make us end up like Greece," he said, arguing that Romney’s supposed policies could lead to a "depression.”

And to top everything off, Krugman, who has spent most of his professional life in academia, believes Romney, who has spent most of ​his ​professionallife in business, is an economic illiterate.

"I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that [Romney] really does understand [economics]," he said. "People say he's a smart guy, but it's not visible in his statements, and it's not visible in his off-the-cuff reactions either."

"I don't have a lot of hope that he actually would know what he's doing at all or that he would even know how to pick the right people," Krugman added.

Final Thought – Presented without comment:

[If you'd like dig deeper into Krugman rebuttals, this piece by Niall Ferguson is an absolute must.]

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(H/T: Newsbusters). Front page photo courtesy the AP.