If you’re ever in need of a good laugh, you’re bound to get one from Paul Krugman, and he’s not even a comedian. He may be a Nobel Prize-winning economist, but his “expert” opinion on virtually anything is about as useful as sunscreen at midnight because he cares more about his partisan objectives than the facts.
For months now, Krugman has been trying to help Biden’s “Bidenomics” pitch by downplaying inflation and otherwise lauding the economy. On Thursday, Krugman posted a consumer price index (CPI) chart before declaring “the war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost.”
The chart itself shows the year-over-year CPI peaking at 7% in the spring of 2022, before going below 2% in September.
There was just one problem with the chart. If you look at the chart heading, you see that the price of food, energy, shelter, and used cars are not included in the analysis. In other words, if you take out the basic necessities of life (food, energy, and shelter), inflation isn’t really all that bad now.
Did I mention that Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist?
The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost pic.twitter.com/opumf3nEvL
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 12, 2023
The post, which has received 14 million views, was quickly flagged with a Community Note that points out that “The exclusion of food, shelter, energy, and used cars is misleading,” and that “All prices included in CPI shows year over year inflation at 3.7% as of September 2023.”
But even that doesn’t tell the whole story. The year-over-year CPI may be 3.7% now, but that doesn’t actually mean prices have gone down. It means that the increase is smaller than it was the previous period.
This is hardly the first time Krugman has embarrassed himself on the issue of inflation. Last year, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times arguing that “2021 was pretty amazing.” And in 2021, he insisted that there was no reason to worry about inflation in 2022 in an effort to assuage concerns following a rather bad inflation report.
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Another classic Krugman fail is when he predicted in November 2020, that there would be an economic boom under Joe Biden. Pretty much the only thing he got right in his prediction was that the availability of COVID-19 vaccines would allow the economy to reopen, creating the perfect scenario for economic growth. “It’s a good guess that we’ll get this pandemic under control at some point [in 2021],” he predicted. “And it’s also a good bet that when we do, the economy will come roaring back.”
You didn’t have to be a Nobel Prize-winning economist to predict that. And for sure, that should have happened. But aside from recovering most of the jobs that were lost during the pandemic, the Biden recovery hasn’t been much to brag about — largely due to the historic inflation that Krugman predicted was going to be no big deal.
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