Economics 101

The new Krugman is out and everybody smells blood. I’ll leave the heavy lifting to the Krugman Truth Squad, but I do want to focus in on one point in the Bearded One’s latest article that is baffling:

As analysts at the nonpartisan California Budget Project point out, real state spending per capita was only 10 percent higher in 2002-03 than it was in 1989-90 — that is, most of the spending growth was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation.

Now I don’t have a fancy PhD like Princeton Paul, but he’s implying that the California spending increase was a natural result of population growth and inflation. But the “real” in “real state spending per capita” means that inflation is held constant while “per capita” means that the population is essentially held constant by expressing spending on a per-person basis. There is no “keeping up” with something that is held constant. Am I missing something here?

Update: Matthew Hoy is first out of the gate.