A falling dollar...

...is always a sure-fire way to scare the Republican Party base. In fact, there was much crying and gnashing of teeth on this very subject at the town hall I attended last Friday. (Never mind that a cheaper dollar can be good for exports -- and jobs. It just sounds bad.) And Congressman Paul Ryan was all too willing to blame the president for this chilling development.

But in his blog today, Paul Krugman has a chart which shows that the dollar is only falling back to its pre-crisis levels.