Kieran’s father, 57-year-old Brian, had worked as a security guard in Lanarkshire, near Glasgow. The day after Christmas 2011, Brian had a stroke, which left him paralyzed on his left side, blind in one eye, and unable to speak. He could no longer continue working to support his family, so he signed up for disability income from the British government.

That government, in the hands of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron since the 2010 elections, would prove no friend to the McArdles. Cameron claimed that hundreds of thousands of Britons were cheating the government’s disability system. The Department for Work and Pensions begged to differ. It estimated that less than 1 percent of disability benefit funds went to people who were not genuinely disabled.

Still, Cameron proceeded to cut billions of pounds from welfare benefits including support for the disabled. To try to meet Cameron’s targets, the Department for Work and Pensions hired Atos, a private French “systems integration” firm. Atos billed the government £400 million to carry out medical evaluations of people receiving disability benefits.

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Kinsey's column sort of cheerfully mocks, in the Kinsleyan fashion, the dark warnings of "anti-austerians" like Krugman. He cheerfully quotes a series of statistics showing how miserable the recent economic crisis has been for Americans, and people around the world, and says, yes, recessions lead to death and austerity worsens recessions but it's worth it because "Austerians believe, sincerely, that their path is the quicker one to prosperity in the longer run." And Kinsley seems to accept that belief as true.

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A phrase often heard is “moral hazard,” a concept borrowed by economists from the insurance industry. In its original usage, the term referred to the risk that insuring against an adverse event would invite the event. For example, someone who insured a house for more than its worth would have an incentive to burn it down. Nowadays, economists use the term to mean any unintended reward for bad behavior. Presumably, if we give debt relief to struggling homeowners or beleaguered nations, we invite more profligacy in the future. Hence, belts need to be tightened not just to improve fiscal balance but as punishment for past misdeeds and inducement for better self-discipline in the future.

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America owes this debt of gratitude to Boehner after he finally came clean on yesterday's edition of ABC's "This Week" and admitted that "we do not have an immediate debt crisis." (His admission was followed up by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who quickly echoed much the same sentiment on CBS' "Face the Nation").

In offering up such a stunningly honest admission, the GOP leader has put himself on record as agreeing with President Obama, who has previously acknowledged that demonstrable reality. But the big news here isn't just about the politics of a Republican House speaker tacitly admitting they agree with a Democratic president. It is also about a bigger admission revealing the fact that the GOP's fiscal alarmism is not merely some natural reaction to reality, but a calculated means to other ideological ends.

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But Black will have to write the exact same column hundreds and hundreds more times in order to have made this argument anywhere near as often as deficit fear-mongers make their arguments.

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Unfortunately for conservatives in the early throes of schadenfreude, the story comes from the Daily Currant, a satirical news site that competes with the Onion. It's bogus. "I decided not to post anything about it; instead, I wanted to wait and see which right-wing media outlets would fall for the hoax," Krugman wrote on his blog. "And Breitbart.com came through!"

"Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go give a lavishly paid speech to Friends of Hamas," he continued, poking fun at Breitbart's recent invention of a group that doesn't exist.

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It was just a day after Krugman’s debate with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on the Charlie Rose show had media, social and otherwise, abuzz, especially after Krugman blogged that he wasn’t quite as sharp as he’d like to have been, unprepared, he said, for “the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff” uttered by the cocksure, blown-dry, blustery congressman-turned-TV-host.

While the right has legions of mouthpieces reading from the same economic playbook, Krugman has emerged as the go-to guy for mainstream shows when they seek a progressive voice. So I asked him to assess, as a communicator, what progressives need to do to even up the score. Here’s his reply:

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While Krugman was the early favorite among liberals, he seemed unprepared for Scarborough’s aggressive debate style. While the economist seemed to expect an academic and substantive discourse, the former congressman came prepared with opposition research on Krugman’s past statements and debated his foe like he would an opposing candidate in an election. Scarborough was on the attack from the beginning and didn’t let up, even mocking the Nobel laureate at times, and occasionally misrepresenting his own or Krugman’s arguments to make a point.

"Why don't we try to argue about the substance and not play gotcha?" Krugman said exasperated.

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If Congress doesn’t act in the next week, automatic across-the-board 5-13 percent spending cuts will make the food system less safe, set back scientific research for a generation, and kick poor kids out of school, homeless people out of shelters, and firefighters off their trucks. Not to mention what sequestration will do to jobs, the economy, national security and adorable zoo animals. The hype is real. It is bad. At least 5-13 percent of the sky is falling.

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Broadly speaking, Austrian economics, for those who have not yet had the pleasure of being introduced, are characterized by an extreme distrust of state intervention in markets, a distaste for statistical modeling and a general confidence that markets, left to their own devices, will avoid booms and busts and nasty things like inflation. From a political perspective, Austrian economics tends to lurk to the right of even such conservative icons as Milton Friedman.

For more detail, you can go, of course, to the Wikipedia page for Austrian economics. But until at least Feb. 28, if you do so, you will find that the page "is currently protected from editing." An "edit war" has been raging behind the scenes. Two factions were repeatedly deleting and replacing a section of text that had to do with a description of a critique of Austrian economics made by economist Paul Krugman.

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In an ABC News Web exclusive, Krugman said: “It is a funny thing. But you want to be funny from a point of view of understanding what the issues are. There’s a reason we’ve gotten to this place." He added: “Obviously neither he nor his staff did even five minutes of looking at the financial blogs which have been talking about this. Lots of people think it’s a bad idea. Lots of people think it’s a good idea. But it’s not just, ‘Oh, those idiots.’"

Watch:

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White House spokesman Jay Carney said Saturday that the Obama administration would not consider minting the platinum coin as an end-around the debt ceiling fight with Republicans in Congress.

Carney, according to the Associated Press, said the only two ways forward are for Congress to pay the bills for spending it authorized, or to push the country into a default.

“The President and the American people won’t tolerate Congressional Republicans holding the American economy hostage again simply so they can force disastrous cuts to Medicare and other programs the middle class depend on while protecting the wealthy,” Carney said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”

A  loophole in a law designed to cover collectible coins provides the Treasury secretary with authority to mint platinum coins in any denomination.

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At issue is the #MintTheCoin campaign, which is urging President Obama to order to the Treasury department to produce a $1 trillion platinum coin that would then be deposited in the Federal Reserve Bank. This way, the government wouldn’t have to borrow money to pay its bills and Republican threats to allow a debt ceiling default would vanish. It sounds far-fetched, but there is actually is a loophole that seems to allow the Treasury to create platinum coins of any value, and the idea has attracted some reputable backers, including Paul Krugman and Rep. Jerry Nadler.

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But all jokes are funniest when taken apart and explained, so I'll give you this one blow by blow. Warning: There's not much of a punch line.

The country is soon approaching its debt limit, which in and of itself is nothing new and scary. It only became a worrying prospect when Tea Party Republicans began in 2011 to threaten to refuse to raise the debt limit, thus risking the U.S. default on its financial commitments, which is roundly considered to be a catastrophe worth avoiding. As in 2011, these Republicans are again threatening not to raise the debt ceiling unless their austerity demands are met.

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I drove in a mild panic to the nearest Verizon Wireless store and met with a sales representative. After asking for my vitals, he typed for a few seconds and waited. Then he typed, then he waited. Then he sighed.

“You can get a new phone,” he said. “At retail price.”

“How much is that?” I asked.

“Four hundred fifty dollars.”

Could I get my current BlackBerry fixed? The rep shook his head sadly. “They don’t let us repair the phones in the store anymore,” he said.

I felt his pain. Having grown up tinkering with Radio Shack electronic kits, I used to love taking things apart—radios, tape players, anything I could get my hands on.

But in the last twenty-five years or so, the number of household devices we can easily tinker with has dwindled.

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Matalin suggested Krugman was more of a polemicist than an economist. And Will charged him with being unwilling to accept competing arguments.

Krugman asserted that Republicans have put nothing on the table to back up their talk about revenue, tax reform and entitlement cuts, calling their negotiating posture nothing but "big talk."

"So how is the president supposed to negotiate with people who say, "Here's my demands. By the way, I can't give you any specifics. Just make me happy," Krugman asked.

Matalin called Krugman "completely mendacious" and insisted that "Republicans have offered in theory and in specificity, for instance, to raise revenues, capping various deductions, not eliminating, but capping them, which the CBO says would raise $1.7 trillion over 10 years. They've been very specific."

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Savings on entitlements, Krugman writes, hit lower- and middle-income Americans harder. Raising the retirement age or the age for Medicare eligibility, he writes, "would be a hugely regressive policy change," because "the increase in life expectancy is concentrated among the affluent; why should janitors have to retire later because lawyers are living longer?"

And on the question of limiting deductions while leaving the Bush rates in effect, he writes:

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Krugman argued for reframing the idea of a "fiscal cliff" in terms of an "austerity bomb" (a term he attributes to Brian Beutler). His (ever-Keynesian) point is that we do not risk tumbling off some metaphorical cliff of towering deficits -- far more threatening is an explosion of austerity. Krugman wrote:

The cliff stuff makes people imagine that it’s a problem of excessive deficits when it’s actually about the risk that the deficit will be too small; also and relatedly, the fiscal cliff stuff enables a bait and switch in which people say “so, this means that we need to enact Bowles-Simpson and raise the retirement age!” which have nothing at all to do with it.

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Despite this indictment, economists have not only retained their prominence in the years since the global financial crisis; they have expanded it. Media-savvy economists have only grown in number, disseminating nuggets of user-friendly economic theory and technocratic liberalism in newspaper columns, blogs, and econo-centric podcasts. Krugman, along with Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb, and Jeffrey Sachs have become household names as swaggering political pundits.

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