Percocet addiction. Percocet….

Your neighbor, or anyone whose knowledge is limited to just TV sound bites, is at least ignorant and perhaps stupid. I think anyone who bases opinions mrely on TV sound bites is stupid. If your neighbor is not stupid (he gets some information by reading and conversations with people like you who are not limited to TV sound bites), but merely ignorant, then suggest that he start spending his leisure time at Cafe Hayek instead of in front of the TV.

As much reading, and listening as I do, I sometimes forget that most people only catch a few soundbites on television, and that's the extent of their knowledge.

In his view, capitalism and free markets in general have been running rampant for the last 8 years, and it has simply failed. Now it is time to give Obama, and more government regulation a chance. A chance to correct all of that greed and corruption of the last 8 years.

That's all the citizenry sees and hears.

He's the one publicly advising Obama to spend much more than he is. If the Federal government printed $10 trillion dollars and used it to buy Jerry Seinfeld's pocket lint, Krugman would count that as $10 trillion of GDP growth, and a job well done.

The original post uses effective rhetoric. Saying “we’re going to run out of money” slams the idea home.

Some, I think, understand the shorthand, while others get lost in the definitions of money. We will not run out of units of account. We will likely see our store of value diminished, and this will alter our means of exchange.

But what really matters is the wealth that money represents. And the current policy is to eat our wealth instead of create more. Eating wealth leaves us collectively poorer, but more equal. Yay for equality.

Bankruptcy can arrest the consumption of wealth, and opens opportunity for wealth creation. Sadly, terrifyingly, at the same time we are eating our wealth, policy is aimed at limiting the creation of new wealth and punishing those who do succeed.

We are aimed and shortage and deprivation. The measure of our starvation in dollars, yen, or troy ounces, matters less to the hungry man than creating a meal.

So we're bailing out would be retirees, and until we acknowledge this reality, we're only whistling in the wind. My kids may lose college tuition that I bothered to purchase for them nearly two decades ago, just as they reach college age. My kids and I could pay rents that I sacrificed to avoid for them, so we can bail out a lot of employee pension funds, so idle people can consume more longer without producing themselves.

That's all I know about the "crisis" at this point, so I'm wondering if my own waning years might better be spent in retirement or in shooting some statesmen, and I don't much distinguish the statesmen in D.C. from the ones in Manhattan. They're all statesmen to me.

What I see as more important is that allowing those insolvent institutions to fail, or save them, or put them into conservatorship, or forcing them to sell to solvent institutions, must become the stated policy of the administration. And then that policy must be followed consistently.

Institutional investors have fled stocks and are unlikely to return until they have some measure of assurance that the companies they invest in will be able to profit in the future. Right now, there is no assurance of that. They don't know which company the government will "save" with capital infusion, which they will allow to fail, which they will force to sell to others, or how long they will do any of these things without changing their mind. Nobody can say from one week to the next, or one day to the next, what the government will be doing with GM, AIG, CITI, or dozens of other publicly traded companies. Companies that investors understood explicitly when they were investing that had the risk of failure.

Explicit understandings of the consequences associated with risk should never be shed in favor of implicit misunderstandings of arbitrary official action on a company's, and shareholders, behalf.

Krugman is brilliant when he sticks to economics.

I haven't seen the evidence that he's brilliant at anything, besides apologizing for his partisans. A Nobel Prize in Economics is not this evidence.

If we revert to Japan, then this becomes our lost decade, and we’re basically screwed.

Like the last decade wasn't lost. The "war on terror" left me feeling sooo much richer.

But can the Obamatrons make things even worse? Sure they can.

Forget gold. The money of the not too distant future is canned goods and ammo.

When you finish digging in, can I have your HD TV?

We could run out of international trading partners, but the current chaos has strengthened the dollar thus far. Apparently, other monetary authorities are no more trustworthy than ours. Apparently, our trading partners have no more attractive option than to sell us goods and then return dollars to our Treasury to spend, even as our central bank manufactures more dollars to buy the Treasury notes back from them. It's a very strange game, and I don't pretend to understand it well.

"Krugman is brilliant when he sticks to economics. The instant he gets into politics or any other subject his logic and factual accuracy disappear."

I don't think that it is reasonable to divorce economics from politics nor many other subjects precisely because the economic analysis has usefully been applied to so many aspects of human action, politics not the least of these.

It's cheaper to keep them afloat and hope for a recovery.

Inflation is a politically preferable option at this point because America has forgotten what inflation is like.