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Paul Krugman at Netroots Nation 2012 this Saturday morning: If You Don’t Know Someone Suffering Financially, You Must Be A Romney:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Saturday morning called the current state of the U.S. economy “incredibly awful.”

“If you don’t know multiple people who are suffering, then you must be living in a very rarefied environment,” he said in a brief address to the Netroots Nation conference. “You must be maybe a member of the Romney clan, or something.”

Krugman is out with a new book, “End This Depression Now!”, and he told the progressive gathering that the country’s economic problems are solvable.

“None of this has to be happening. We didn’t have a plague of locusts, we were not hit by a tsunami, there wasn’t some act of God that created this terrible situation. It was acts of man.”

Krugman, who has seen an advance copy of his newspaper’s review of “End This Depression,” dinged the Times’ book review editor. [...]

Krugman concluded that Americans are living under the tyranny of “very serious people” — people like Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, he said. “Solving this depression is not fundamentally an economic problem, it’s a political problem.”