Paul Krugman is getting sillier and sillier these days. He’s supposed to be an economist, and not long ago some people in Sweden gave him an award for his economic work. So why would he suggest that economic incentives just don’t matter?

The New York Times columnist bashed Republican Senator Jon Kyl for stating that generous unemployment benefits can reduce the incentive to look for new work. Krugman says that this isn’t the textbook view of things shared by himself and the Democrats. “What Democrats believe,” Krugman says, “is what textbook economics says.”

Gee. So what does textbook economics say?

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal actually checked a textbook in economics. According to this textbook, “Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job.”

Interesting. So who wrote this textbook? Yes, that’s right: Paul Krugman.

This partisan fellow, Krugman, often seems to go out of his way to be contradictory as possible. Does he believe his own babbling? Or is he just trying to get a rise out of us?

Or is it to please his editors over at the Times?

Call it an economic incentive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

The president says he’s creating jobs. I’m skeptical. I guess there are some things government can do to ensure that jobs get created, out there in the bill-paying, profit-making world. But these do not include spending trillions of borrowed money.

And neither do they include simply giving more money to state and local governments.

The truth about Obama’s much-ballyhooed job creation is that more than half of his alleged new jobs turn out to be government jobs.

Government jobs don’t count, Mr. President.

Remember, many things governments do actually drain us. Jobs in the marketplace, on the other hand, serve real consumer demand, make us all better off. They also help pay the taxes for those government jobs. Employing more people in government means needing more real jobs to pay for the government ones.

And how much work do politicians cause us to engage in just to unbury ourselves from their silly, wealth-extracting regulations? I know, I know: Every time they add on some new complication to the tax code, jobs emerge in the accounting and tax-consulting industry. But this doesn’t exactly make us better off, does it? Not on net.

This lesson applies generally. Here’s the bottom line. Government can borrow and tax to spend to create “gross jobs.” Sure. But on net, after balancing the collective books, we’re not better off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

A humungous national debt. Growing state federal government budget deficits. Social Security and Medicare, running out of funds. All very frightening. But look out: The costs of public employee pensions are walloping city and state budgets — pushing a number of California cities into bankruptcy.

Though the stock market tumble hasn’t helped, the basic problem lies squarely with politicians. They like to increase future benefits to gain political support from public employee unions; they then underfund their lavish promises, the better to hide the fiscal reality from today’s taxpayers.

Politicians keep running from the problem, but a website called PensionTsunami.com won’t let them hide. The site, run by Californian Jack Dean, offers a steady stream of horror stories:

* A new report calls the Kansas Public Employee Retirement System “bankrupt.”
* A Rye, New York, city manager makes $198,000 a year while still collecting a pension for the same job.
* The chief actuary for the California Public Employees Retirement System admits that current pension costs are “unsustainable.”

All across the country, politicians consistently fail to act. Californians are lucky: They have the voter initiative. The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a group whose board includes Mr. Dean, is planning a statewide initiative to prevent their approaching tsunami.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

It’s a dangerous world. You never know when someone may be out there . . . petitioning their government?

In the past few months, citizens circulating petitions for an anti-tax referendum have hit Oregon streets. And with those citizens trailed a team of investigators. The Secretary of State had hired them, paying with funds provided courtesy of state legislators — the same politicians who passed the tax increases petitioners are seeking to block.

The surveillance proved almost as amusing as it is frightening. For four-fifths of the time investigators put in — at $40 to $70 an hour — they couldn’t even locate petition circulators to commence their stakeouts.

One government agent secretly infiltrated a training seminar held by Americans for Prosperity. The covert op filed this shocking report: “The training was very thorough and was consistent with the training provided by the Elections Division.”

In the end, investigators found no serious wrongdoing — none of the fraudulent activity that might justify secretive investigations of citizens who just happen to oppose the legislators’ policies.

Oregon politicians claim such tactics are necessary to “to protect the integrity of our electoral system.” But they’ve completely lost touch with basic democratic principles. Without any evidence a crime has been committed, citizens petitioning their government or engaging in other political pursuits should not be subjected to secret witch-hunts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

Does $40.3 million seem like a lot of money to you? It does to me.

But to the Social Security Administration? It’s a drop in the bucket.

Or, a drop out of the bucket.

You see, while the federal government is scheduled to soon reinstate the estate tax on the wealth of deceased people, we now learn that it has also been giving money to the dearly departed.

Yes, an internal audit of the Social Security Administration revealed that it paid out more than $40 million to over six thousand dead people.

These benefits were given out weeks, months, years after receiving death certificates. The bureaucracy had been duly notified. And yet it went blithely on, continuing to send monthly checks.

Bureaucratic error. Hey, we all make mistakes. But it’s worth noting that this was an internal audit. Who knows what we’d catch if it were an external audit, with teeth?

Lately, the federal government has been talking over car companies and banks. Now the president and Congress plan to take control of the medical sector of our economy. They tell us they’ll cut medical costs by cutting waste. Yeah, right.

On a cheerier note, we needn’t fear the institution of those so-called “death panels” to cut costs. The way the feds work, there’d be no savings — they’d still be paying for care long after the patients were dead and gone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

Is President Barack Obama trying to echo the paranoid days of the Clintons’ famous “vast right-wing conspiracy” complaint? Obama says that those who oppose the Democrats’ medical reforms are “those who are profiting from the status quo.” Further, he says the opposition is “well-financed.”

Great story, if true.

But the president won’t name names. When asked by Washington Examiner columnist Timothy Carney, the White House declined to name any individual, any group, any organization profiting in the industry now and actively supporting the opposition. Same for Obama’s revamped campaign outfit, Organizing for America. It’s now run by the Democratic National Committee. Carney asked folks there which nefarious profiteer funds against Obama, but they wouldn’t clarify a thing.

Carney went looking in the medical care industry, looking at the companies and organizations with the deepest pockets. Which ones are now spending millions to oppose Obama’s reforms? He found zip. Nada. Bubkes.

The big pharmaceuticals are on board with the Democrats, it turns out. So are the biggest insurance companies.

The president is just blowing smoke. The opponents of his medical industry reforms are not well-financed. They are grassroots and widespread.

The big companies hope that the reforms will consolidate their market-leading positions, protect them from competition. Most big government programs do just that.

The people, on the other hand, have the most to lose from more government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

If a doctor who is supposed to help you get better keeps stabbing you with a knife instead, it may seem beside the point to focus on any particular wound. The whole stabbing process is wrong.

Democrats in Congress have found a way to duplicate this effect. Their evolving medical reform package is prolific in ways to attack our freedom.

But remember: Some stab wounds may slice closer to the heart than others.

If the current majority government has its way, in the new healthcare regime we won’t simply be invited to cooperate. There are huge hunks of coercive power built into their system. Force. Not friendly reminders and advertising enticements.

Take a simple provision of their plan: Individuals who decline to sign up for approved medical insurance will be financially penalized. You might be ordered to forfeit 2.5 percent of your income above a certain level. What happens if you refuse to pay this fine? The IRS could swoop in and seize your assets. Eventually, you could end up in jail.

Today, we don’t have much privacy right when it comes to dealings with the IRS. But at least agents refrain from prying into details of our medical coverage. Under the new regime, though, the tax agency would directly monitor your insurance compliance, and give your tax info to health commissars.

Kind of makes you feel sick, doesn’t it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

Politicians often don’t read the bills they pass. And what they do read they often don’t trouble themselves to actually understand.

There’s plenty of evidence for these claims in the cap-and-trade and healthcare debates. Lawmakers have been much more concerned about hurtling to the finish line than with making sure they can understand and explain what they’re foisting on the rest of us.

Some say they gotta rush because, otherwise, the economy would fall over the cliff. But what if what’s in these Tolstoy-novel-sized bills is what pushes the economy over the cliff?

Well, if lawmakers don’t read the murky and complicated, important bills, do they pause over the simple, unimportant ones? Heck no. Yet you can tuck poison into any bit of legislation. No matter how seemingly trivial.

Back in the ’70s, a Texas lawmaker named Tom Moore decided to play an April Fool’s joke on his colleagues. He sponsored a resolution to commend one Albert de Salvo for his impact on community and country.

The resolution talked about how DeSalvo’s “devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely . . . [to] achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future.” How the state of Massachusetts had “officially recognized” DeSalvo’s unconventional “population control techniques.” The lawmakers passed the resolution unanimously.

Just one problem. DeSalvo was the serial killer otherwise known as the Boston Strangler.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

Scan the history of government programs. The scope and costs usually grow much larger than originally projected.

Moreover, ham-fisted government intervention distorts markets, causing shortages or excesses of supply, leading to high prices for goods that should be cheap, and so on.

When the problems pile up one can either repeal the controls or heap on more controls.

Guess which “solution” politicians tend to prefer.

Regarding medical care, the politicians’ answer to decades of government bungling is more bungling: regulation, subsidies, rationing, mandates and a new “public option” in health insurance to squeeze out private plans.

President Obama and other public option advocates promise, on stacks of Bibles, that this is not “somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system.”

But they’re lying. Go to YouTube. Watch the videos of Obama and congressmen explicitly admitting their goal of a single-payer system. Just two years ago, Obama was saying, “But I don’t think we’re gonna be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s gonna be potentially some transition process. . . .”

That’s how we lose our freedoms. Not all at once, but a slice at a time.

Oh, and about employer-provided medical insurance. That’s a clumsy institution that exists because of World War II wage controls. We do have to transition out of that system. But we should “transition” towards more freedom, not less.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation, for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org

Politicians do pay a price when they break a term limits pledge: No pledge breaker has ever been elected to higher office.

In 1992, Marty Meehan ran for Congress promising to serve four terms at most. In 1995, he rebuked congressmen for violating similar pledges, saying, “The best test of any politicians’ credibility on term limits, is whether they are willing to . . . limit their own service.” Meehan even filed a letter of resignation with the House clerk that supposedly would go into effect should he break his own word. But he did break it, finally leaving Congress only in 2007.

Meehan had always wanted to be governor. That was not to be.

Term limits have always been popular, and it’s embarrassing to be known for breaking a term limits pledge.

A new outfit called Alliance for Bonded Term Limits believes more than reputation should take a hit when politicians violate a term limits pledge. They think candidates should legally contract to pay up if they wimp out.

The plan, according to their website, is to “provide a vehicle for sincere candidates to demonstrate their commitment to limited tenure in office by voluntarily bonding their term limit promise with personal assets in advance of the election. These bonded assets of substantial worth will be forfeited to charity only if their promise is broken.”

Will it work? So far, the organization just has an idea. It’s a gleam in someone’s eye. But let’s keep our fingers crossed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation for more information go to www.citizensincharge.org