Rating: 
Summary: A totally dishonest diatride by a suspect NYT writer
Review: Noone should take seriously a NYT writer these days; least of all Mr. Krugman whose bias is well known. He is a party hack who repeats the false accusations (disputing some of his own remarks, actually) that we hear constantly from the militant Lefties (i.e, blaming Bush for the bursting of the stock market bubble that everyone knew would burst and which, in fact, began bursting in the year 2000 under Clinton.)He is hysterical enough to equate the Bush administration with the totalitarian regimes of the pre-WWII era. If you look back at his columns for the year, you will see that much of what he predicted has been proven false. Krugman is a party hack, putting out this book in time (he hopes) to influence the election. My advice is to stay away from partisan writers if you want true analysis. If you want both sides of the Krugman reputation, check out the Krugman Truth Squad articles on National Review Online. This column regularly points out his errors and lies.
Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent and insightful! Brilliant Title!
Review: By far the most patriotic book to grace the American bookshelves, Eye opening!. Sorry all you radical, angry, right wing, Republican raisen brains, the truth always hurts. Bravo! Paul Krugman on a job well done.
Rating:
Summary: Breaking down a Swindle
Review: Mr. Harper's review overlooks the core of Krugman's book: President Bush mislead the American people with phony math and misleading promises about who was going to get the tax cuts, how much was going to be budgeted for America's social needs and what the effect would be on the federal budget. The President utilized aggressive acounting and not just "fuzzy" math but "phony budget math". Why Mr. Harper would like for Krugman to explain something that has no basis in mathematical reality is unreasonable. Con-men pull off confidence games only because their chumps believe in them. Krugman is merely calling our attention to the tax swindle that Bush and Company have perpetrated. He is also charging the media with forfeiting its responsibility to assist the "average Joe" in analyzing budget issues. American media is too wrapped up in the sensational reporting to care about the serious reporting. Krugman is encouraging us to start paying attention to the real issues and start doing our own math so we won't keep getting suckered by politicians who count on our ignorance to fuel their swindles.
Rating:
Summary: Lays it out in plain English
Review: This book is a true "no spin zone" that makes a devastating case against the regime of George W. Bush and shows Mr. Bush and his cronies for what they truly are: the lying-est, most corrupt, most mendacious, most anti-democratic administration in our country's history. They are conducting a class war against the bottom 90% of Americans, and we are getting our collective butts kicked! Read it and weep. Then, do something about it.
Rating:
Summary: A Right Wing Conspiracy - Really
Review: Forget Steven King and Dean Koontz, hell, forget Edgar Allen Poe. Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling is the scariest book in print. And with Krugman that wonderful sense of terror, that sense of panic and alarm, doesn't begin to wear off when the last page is finished. After reading those other creepy books, the fear lingers only for a while; after reading Poe one can still hear a few quiet scratches from behind the bricks or, after a night of Koontz one can see ghostly images passing nighttime windows. But reality soon takes over and the images fade. Not so with this book, when the last page of The Great Unraveling is turned you're forced to acknowledge that George W. Bush is still President and that Dick Chaney is still out there - somewhere. Paul Krugman teaches economics at Princeton and writes a regular op-ed column on economics in the New York Times. The Great Unraveling is a collection of his pieces from the last few years, mostly focused on the Bush administration and its bizarre handling of the domestic political economy. If that doesn't sound interesting you will be pleasantly surprised. Krugman's columns are not the kind of economic writing you were forced to read in college. They are not filled with obscure equations and sprinkled with Greek letters. These essays are short, clear and often surprisingly funny. In 1999, when the Times contacted him about writing for the paper his professional focus had, for some time, been international financial crises. So, Krugman admits, he did not expect to spend much time writing on domestic politics, but that expectation was based on the assumption that "American policy would remain sensible and responsible." It didn't. The book is more than a collection of newspaper columns. Professor Krugman has grouped them into chapters and themes and has added an introduction that, alone, is worth the price of the book. In that introduction he sets the political context for the columns that follow and characterizes the Bush administration for what it is: a radical break with the most basic assumptions of all previous post World War II American governments. You don't believe me? Read the book. Krugman convincingly argues that Bush and company have done everything they can to "smash the existing framework" and to mold the world to fit their pre-conceived notions of what it should be. Bush's obsession with massive tax cuts, primarily for the wealthiest 1%, provide the clearest example of ever-shifting rationales for pre-conceived policy. Candidate Bush first proposed the cuts to "return the excessive surplus" to the people. Then, after the surplus vanished, they were to provide short-run economic stimulus, then, when few believed that, they were said to promote long-run growth. Throughout the book Krugman demonstrates that, in almost every area of policy, when the shifting rationales don't work, Bush just lies. And with a surprisingly large number of voters it all seems to go unnoticed. That is the scary part.
Rating:
Summary: A Timely Warning
Review: I found this book to be highly interesting. First of all, this book is made up of Krugman's columns from the The New York Times and Fortune magazine, so there isn't a lot of new material in this book. The good point is that these columns are collected into different categories, so you can see the flow of Krugman's reasoning clearly. For me, the most interesting thing I learned is that Bush's tax cuts were completely unnecessary and benefited mostly rich and wealthy people. For example the much talked about death tax is only applicable to estates over 3 million dollars. The average person doesn't even pay death taxes, but the way Bush talks about it, you would think everyone is paying through the nose. Krugman also goes on to outline how Bush lies about his budget numbers, something people don't often double-check. It's good to see that consciencious economists such as Krugman are keep us informed. Also Krugman points out Bush's crony capitalism. It's commonly known that Bush only invites his friends to play, but Krugman gives some concrete examples. This book is a must read before the 2004 election. Inform yourself of the facts.
Rating:
Summary: Calling all cars--heist in progress
Review: With a series of Op-Ed editorials from the Times in which it slowly dawns on the author what the Bush gang is up to, this book is a major wake-up call for those knocked senseless as couch potatoes about to be cashiered from a democracy society.
So what's going on? What's this gang at dot.gov.whitehouse up to? As Krugman puts it:
Put it this way: Suppose that you actually liked a caste society, and you were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you do?
One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more. You'd also try to create tax shelters mainly useful for the rich. And more broadly still, you'd try to reduce tax rates on people with high incomes, shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear most heavily on people with lower incomes.
Meanwhile, on the spending side, you'd cut back on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education. This would make it more difficult for people with low incomes to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to upward mobility in the modern economy.
And just to close off as many routes to upward mobility as possible, you'd do everything possible to break the power of unions, and you'd privatize government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced with poorly paid private employees.
It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it?
Where is this taking us? Thomas Piketty, whose work with Saez has transformed our understanding of income distribution, warns that current policies will eventually create "a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can't compete." If he's right--and I fear that he is--we will end up suffering not only from injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.
Goodbye, Horatio Alger. And goodbye, American Dream.
Rating:
Summary: required reading
Review: I just finished half of this book on the flight to California for Christmas vacation and I have to say that I am very impressed. Krugman is the first author to make the point that we are in the middle of a revolution and most of us are unaware of it. I will resist the urge to make a cheap joke about right wing extremists being revolting. . . no I won't.
On page 4 he references no less an authority than Henry Kissingers doctoral dissertation on the rise of Napoleon and Robespierre (revolutionarys)and their assult on the stable democratic government of france as an example of the methods the Neocons are using to assult our democracy. It's scary stuff.
I would also recommend Al Frankens book as a well documented (WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED) study filled with graphs facts and fiqures about the state of our country under President Clinton as opposed to the current resident of the White House. Yes I said resident!
The one point that I would like to sress about these books is that NO ONE has been able to refute any of the facts in these books. And that should serve as a wake up call to our conservative friends as well as our liberal friends,who aren't speaking out, that they are being conned,or neoconned,big time by their political heroes/leaders. Just as people in power have used racial hatred as a way to blind us and keep us from working together so they try to separate us politically using economic status.
Try this on for size,no matter what your political beliefs, from page 220 of The Great Unraveling: A recent Congressional Budget Office report states that "adjusting for inflation, the income of families in the middle of the U.S. income distribution roes from $41,400 in 1979 to $45,100 in 1997, a 9% increase. Meanwhile the income of families in the top 1% sose from $420,200 to 1.016 million, a 140% increase.
If that doesn't give one pause then go back to sleep and remember that old cannard that a person gets the government they deserve!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
A happy seasonal greeting from San Diego
THE VACATIONING PROUD LIBERAL
"THE DOCTOR IS IN"
Rating: 
Summary: A terrific insight into how America works
Review: Paul Krugman, the able-minded economist-turned-columnist, has done the country a great service with his new book "The Great Unraveling". So many of us tend to see the United States through the eyes of politicians, sound bites and slanted news but Krugman tells it like it is and doesn't mince words in doing so. Sure, he has his own bias and he is unashamed of telling the readers just that. But his insight comes from letting us know how the country has become "unraveled" during the Bush administration with regard to miscues, bad judgment and an overall wrong direction with regard to the economic standing of the United States....not just here at home but around the world. I would guess that most readers know little about the economy and certainly far less than the author but here's Krugman's greatest strength.... he's a teacher. He gives us examples about why certain policies have failed, explaining how those policies happened, the effect on the economy and the potential for more of these mistakes to be made. The great mistake that conservatives make about liberals is that they tend to view us as "gloom and doom" prophets and Krugman alludes to this in his book, but I think that without his exposing the lies and misdeeds of Bush and his "handlers" more economic hanky-panky would certainly ensue. My reason for not giving the book five stars lies in my agreement with several other reviewers. The book jumps around too much. It needs a central thread to keep the reader in place and too often we're jumping from one crisis to another. I found myself having to remember back a few years ago to what was happening in Japan or Argentina, for instance. But that is more a matter of style than of substance. Paul Krugman has laid out a definitive case against this administration....an administration that has tried to bull its way through, cooking numbers as it goes without much regard for those who disagree and caring little for world opinion. He correctly ties economic decisions to politics and for that reason alone, Krugman has been a great contributor to the debate going on regarding the direction of this country. I highly recommend "The Great Unraveling".
Rating:
Summary: Fully Explores Dubya's Idiocy
Review: There are a lot of so-called "liberal" books on the bestseller list right now-- "Lies and the Lying Liars" and "Dude, Where's My Country?"-- but for sheer intellectual rigor and depth of detail, this book beats them all hands down. For one thing, Krugman is not your typical "tax-and-spend liberal." He is a free-market economist more in line with the sensible, moderate economic policies of Clinton than with any far left movement. Even so, his columns reveal his increasing disgust and bewilderment at Dubya's plan to give handouts to the already obscenely wealthy and eviscerate federal programs. Krugman is at his best lambasting Dubya. Krugman shows how Dubya took part in Enron-like schemes at Harken Energy, and intends to gut the S.E.C., so Dubya's lip service about increased corporate governance holds little weight. Krugman details Dubya's repeated broken promises, including promises for aid to New York City, and we see that Dubya seems incapable of carrying out his word. Of course, Dubya is primarily a tool of the radical right. Krugman shows how the right will settle for nothing less than the dismantling of the federal government and its programs (except for a constant state of war, of course), akin to Henry Kissinger's paper on "revolutionary powers." Nobody likes paying taxes, but Krugman shows how deeply stupid and impractical such an agenda is: are we going to gut all government services, like the FDNY? 9/11 would have been much, much worse if the right had its way. That's what the conservatives who argue against public airport security want-- they think that corporation do everything better, even though the sole purpose of every for-profit corporation is the bottom line, not security, safety, education, etc. Do you really want security run like McDonald's? Basically, Krugman explores how moronic it is to believe that gutting the federal government will make life better for the average person. Does your kid want to go to college? Sorry, your A kid won't qualify for federal aid-- only rich kids like C-student Dubya will attend the Ivy League. The rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer, and Dubya is helping to exacerbate the economic divide. But even talk of rich and poor, while obvious to the most casual observer, will set off the right about how liberals want "class warfare." One conservative I know put forward the idiotic argument that Dubya was being "persecuted" for being the son of a President-- if "persecution" means attaining the office of President solely through birthright, persecute me! There is much more to this book, and I urgently recommend you read it, especially before the 2004 election. It will make you angry-- hopefully angry enough to get Dubya out in 2004.
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