You do the math

I’m glad Paul Krugman has raised his sights from his preoccupation with purely domestic economic issues. “Faced with a proposal that would save the lives of eight million people every year, many of them children, we balk at the cost. But when asked to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million, we don’t hesitate.”

It seems, not to anyone’s surprise, that the Bono-O’Neill roadshow through Africa isn’t changing the Treasury Secretary’s views. Krugman charitably reckons O’Neill isn’t deaf or blind to Africa’s needs. From everything I’ve seen, part of the problem is he just doesn’t have the intellectual grasp of economic issues to get what’s going on.