by Robert Reich
'Ordinarily I wouldn’t pick on a particular columnist but I respect Paul Krugman. Also, his perch at the New York Times gives him broad influence – especially just two and a half weeks before the important New York State primary. But his piece today (which I’ve attached) is shot through with errors.
1. The biggest Wall Street banks did indeed precipitate the crisis on Wall Street in 2008 because of their gambling in newfangled financial instruments and fancy derivatives even they didn't understand.
2. Their size did make a difference because they were so interconnected with other financial entities both in the U.S. and around the world that they were "too big to fail." Today's biggest Wall Street banks are much bigger than they were in 2008.
3. Size also has a bearing on their political influence. The reason the Glass-Steagall Act was scotched by Bill Clinton's administration, and the Clinton administration wouldn't agree with the CFTC to regulate derivatives, had a lot to do with the influence of Wall Street over the Clinton administration and over Congress. The political power of the biggest players on the Street is even larger today – as evidenced by their capacity to whittle back significant parts of Dodd-Frank in the regulatory process.
4. Breaking up the biggest banks isn’t a radical idea. In fact, many experts – including the current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (who’s a Republican and a former executive of Goldman Sachs), and the former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas -- have called for exactly this.
5. Bernie's other ideas -- for a single-payer plan, and for free tuition at public institutions of higher education – are sensible, and also backed by many experts. It’s well-established that a single-payer plan would be far less costly and deliver far better care than our own system, which is based on private for-profit insurers. As to free tuition in public universities, we were well on the way to this goal in the 1950s and 1960s. It was and is a logical extension of free K-12 education.
6. Finally, the current brouhaha over who's "qualified to be president" was arguably started by Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think neither she nor Bernie should be calling the other unqualified, but to blame Bernie for this exchange is simply incorrect.'
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and the rest is just a miserable mess. 
