Find the Romer/Krugman contradiction game is on!

Krugman poiints out that total government spending has been within trend.  I point out that central government spending has skyrocketed relative to state spending.

Romer really wants to get more money into  state paychecks for teachers, using central government debt.  I point out that one of the inflexibility of local government spending is that 15% of total tax revenue first goes to central government debt service.   I point out that we have still not covered the adjustment costs for NCLB.

Both stake their claim on the Keynesian right of inflation by government spending, but what they really mean is central government increasing dominance of the government yield curve.  That is contractionary, we have a couple of other names, multiplier less than one, crowding out.  Remember, these two also favored adding a new central government health care entitlement, in a land where we have too many already.  Which entitlement gets thrown under the school bus?

But the bottom fundamental theoretical error is simply that we do not have a proper combinations of deals and contracts at the central level to get the fine tuning they want.