A quick video, thankfully not from Midtown Manhattan<\/p>\n
Hi there. Paul Krugman with a very quick update. <\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t done a regular post today because I\u2019m jet-lagged out of my mind, but I just wanted to weigh in on something that will be happening a few minutes after I record this. Which is that a significant piece of Midtown Manhattan \u2014 the area surrounding Madison Square Garden \u2014 is about to be closed to all pedestrians.<\/p>\n
This is because of the Knicks game which is in Madison Square Garden. And Donald Trump is attending the Knicks game. Which means that the game entry itself is going to require enormously strict security. People are forbidden from bringing any kind of bag in there. It means that what should be an exciting joyous occasion is going to become quite hellish with long lines and who knows what else.<\/p>\n
But what really may not be obvious to many people \u2014 you might not know if you\u2019re not a New Yorker \u2014 is that Madison Square Garden sits on top of Penn Station.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a story in itself, but there it is. And Penn Station is the busiest transit hub in America. It is where 600,000 or so people pass through on their way to and from New York by way of the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit. I\u2019ve spent a lot of my life waiting for trains at Penn Station. <\/p>\n
And it\u2019s completely insane to ruin people\u2019s day like that. You could say, well, what else are you going to do if you\u2019re going to have to provide security for the President of the United States? And the answer is, Why does he have to go to this thing? The simple way to make several hundred thousand people\u2019s lives noticeably better, at least for today, would be to just not go to the damn game. He can watch it on TV. He can go have a cage match in the ripped up White House lawn, if he likes.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not such a small thing. It shows a kind of contempt for ordinary people and a kind of self-aggrandizement \u2014 I want this so I\u2019m going to make other people\u2019s lives miserable just to indulge my whim \u2014 that is part and parcel of everything else that\u2019s going on. It\u2019s a small thing but my god I would actually have had a problem if I went into my office today because my office is not that far from Penn Station. It\u2019s not in the banned zone but it\u2019s going to be nightmares all around.<\/p>\n
All right, just another message that the people in charge do not care about people like you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A quick video, thankfully not from Midtown Manhattan Hi there. Paul Krugman with a very quick update. I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-260206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}