Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economics professor, Nobel Prize winner, and regular New York Times op-ed contributor says, "Debt matters, but not that much."

Not only is he off the reservation on this one, but he's completely fallen off his high horse.

In the real world, debt actually matters a lot.

In a Houston Chronicle opinion piece last week, Krugman, riding his horse - whose name might as well be Liberal Conscience - trampled conservatives under the guise of an economics lesson that derided "deficit-worriers" for wrongly seeing "America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments."

According to Krugman, that's a bad analogy and "the way our politicians think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem's size."

Decide for yourself. Either debt matters a lot, or not that much...

The World According to Paul Krugman

Professor Krugman calls all the conversation in Washington about debt and deficits a "misplaced focus" and says all of the economic experts "on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits."

He derides the fears that deficits will cause interest rates to soar by pointing out that they haven't moved.

What he doesn't say is that they haven't moved because they're not free to move.

The fact is that the U.S. Federal Reserve has corralled the free market in interest rates by knocking short-term rates to almost zero through successive open market operations and extraordinary quantitative easing measures.

Mr. Krugman mocks those waiting for rates to rise and notes that while they wait "rates have dropped to historical lows."

Maybe what he doesn't realize is that the Fed's actions themselves have been nothing short of historical.

The crux of Mr. Krugman's supposition that debt doesn't matter much is based on his bashing of the popular analogy comparing America's debt problems to those of a mortgaged homeowner.

All of which Krugman claims is "a really bad analogy in at least two ways."

He says, "First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don't - all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base."

"Second," he says, "an over-borrowed family owes the money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe ourselves."

He goes on to say that the debt from World War II was never repaid and didn't make postwar America poorer.

In fact, the Professor points out, "the debt didn't prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation's history."

Krugman is Flat Out Wrong

First off, the homeowner analogy is excellent--not irrelevant.

Mr. Krugman is wrong when he says that homeowners have to pay back their debt. The truth is they don't have to.

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