Via HuffPo:
Princeton Professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said President Barack Obama erred by saying Friday that the private sector is “doing fine,” but Krugman agreed with the substance of the president’s argument that public sector job cuts are hurting the economy.
“That was an unfortunate line,” said the Nobel Prize-winning economist Mondayon CBS’s “This Morning.” “The president bungled the line.”
“The truth is the private sector is doing better than the public sector, which is not well enough,” he said. “The real story of this economy is that cutbacks at the public sector are what’s hurting the recovery.”
Krugman continued, “By this point in Obama’s presidency if we had normal public sector job growth, we’d have 800,000 more people — firefighters, schoolteachers, police officers. Instead, we’ve got 600,000 fewer. So right there it’s like 1.4 million jobs we should have had in the public sector and of course those would translate into more private sector jobs too — so that’s what he was trying to get at.”
“And of course, he screwed up the line.”