On Friday, I got an alert on my phone for a story while I was out shopping, and I have to admit, I was intrigued by the headline: "'Disturbing scenario': Top economist sees apocalyptic future that MAGA doesn't understand."
Who was this "top economist" they spoke of? I just had to click on the link.
I nearly burst out laughing in the middle of the store.
"New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predicts that Donald Trump will take credit for all of President Joe Biden's economic successes over the past four years — and anticipates that the President-elect's fans have no idea of the damage his policies could cause," read the opening line of the article from Raw Story.
I don't know what's funnier, that Raw Story dubbed Krugman a "top economist" or that it actually took this man seriously. Sure, he's a Nobel Prize-winning economist, but Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize for literally doing nothing, so such distinctions mean very little to me. Here's how the article continued.
Krugman began a conversation with The New Republic's Greg Sargent by saying that Americans don't understand how essential immigrants are to the U.S. economy.
"It is something like maybe 8 million undocumented workers in the United States, something like 5 percent of the workforce," he said. "You say, OK, that would be pretty bad if we lose that, but how bad could it be? And the answer is that they are not evenly distributed.
"The whole food supply chain is reliant on people who are going to be rounded up and put in camps."
He said that many people don't understand how food gets to their table, from planting to picking, processing, transporting and stocking. Slogans and absolutist ideas like throwing out immigrants are going to cause "a pretty big shock to people’s cost of living and the way they live," he added.
Why is anybody listening to this man? He might actually be mostly famous for being wrong so much.
He famously predicted in 1998 that “by 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
Krugman has also repeatedly been wrong about the impact of Bitcoin. "Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is one of the most influential individuals in his field, which means people listen when he talks about bitcoin," wrote Reason magazine in 2021. "Unfortunately, most of what he has had to say about the cryptocurrency over the years has been misguided, uninformed, or just plain wrong."
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Back in 2010, Krugman touted Europe’s social democratic economic model as a major success, claiming that it proved the viability of such policies. However, soon after, Europe faced a significant financial crisis marked by debt and fiscal instability.
Krugman also laughably predicted that if Trump won the 2016 election, there would be a "global recession with no end in sight."
That never happened.
In November 2020, Krugman confidently predicted a booming economy under Joe Biden. Four years later, we're still waiting for the boom. He also brushed off concerns about inflation, claiming in early 2022 that there was no need to worry. Needless to say, the skyrocketing prices that followed told a very different story.
Rather than admit his errors, Krugman doubled down. In 2022, he wrote in The New York Times that “2021 was pretty amazing” as though the economic boom he predicted had arrived. Krugman is less an economist and more a left-wing cheerleader wearing ideological blinders.
Seriously, why is anyone taking anything this man says seriously?
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