Paul Krugman: NY Times pundit, Nobel Prize-winning economist, and now sci-fi visionary. You know you've run out of ideas when you think faking an alien invasion could be a way to boost the economy.

Yes, Paul Krugman did indeed say this in a conversation with economist Kenneth Rogoff and CNN's Fareed Zakaria:

KRUGMAN: If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better –

ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you're saying.

KRUGMAN: No, there was a "Twilight Zone" episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

[For the record, according to Eric Falkenstein, it was an episode of The Outer Limits and not The Twilight Zone. Yes, it is on YouTube.]

I'm sure the economic benefits of faking an alien invasion will inspire a few PhD. dissertations, but let's be serious and do something to actually improve economic growth like reforming the regulatory system which, according to the Wall Street Journal, cost the Ruby liquefied natural gas pipeline to be only 23% over budget, or taking Sen. Rob Portman's advice and passing the pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

Let's walk away slowly before Krugman starts speculating about how random X-Files episodes could fix the European Union's debt problems.