Paul Krugman tries to slip one past his readers:
Some readers have asked whether there isn’t an inconsistency between my view that the Fed can promote economic recovery by changing expectations about future policy, and my ridicule of austerity proponents who invoke “confidence” as a reason to believe that austerity will actually be expansionary. But there isn’t really any inconsistency; it’s an orders of magnitude thing.
I don’t find this a convincing explanation without any attempt to demonstrate the precise difference between those orders of magnitude, but we’ll let it slide for now. The reason we can do so is that there is a much more profound and glaring inconsistency between his “ridicule of austerity proponents who invoke “confidence” as a reason to believe that austerity will actually be expansionary” and the “animal spirits” upon which macroeconomic growth depends according to the General Theory of John Maynard Keynes to which Mr. Krugman neo-subscribes.