So here’s the thing. If PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is serious about combatting widespread public opinion that the tax-supported “news service” is a haven for elitist leftists (which is exactly what it is), trotting out the ever-smug economist, Paul Krugman isn’t the best way to go about showing it.
During a taped interview with PBS economics reporter Paul Solman, which the outlet aired on Thursday, Krugman was his usual pathetic, self-centered self throughout.
Incidentally, the former New York Time columnist has been on a years’-long crusade to find a social media app that would take down Elon Musk’s X (formerly, Twitter), and has insisted for years that President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win over Democrat Hillary Clinton was “rigged.”
Solman kicked off the festivities.
For just short of 25 years, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman was a New York Times columnist. He began the column in the Clinton years. Krugman left The Times just before Donald Trump was inaugurated. I asked him what has changed in 25 years.
Krugman said that back in the day, he was “extremely optimistic.” But today? (emphasis, mine)
When I began writing the column, people were extremely optimistic. I was hired basically to talk about all the good news and maybe funny stuff that was happening in this glorious late 1990s economic boom. And it’s been a very troubled world since then.
[…]
Most voters have very little idea of policy. I mean, you look at the polling, ask people, do you approve of Obamacare, and it’s still pretty negative. And you ask, do you approve of the Affordable Care Act, and it’s very positive. So that’s telling you something about what voters understand about policy.
I’m unaware that most voters see the Affordable Care Act very positively, but let’s move on—with Krugman continuing to, let’s call it, “twist the truth”:
Are you personally better off than you were five years ago? In October, a clear plurality of Americans said, no, we’re worse off. In November, a clear plurality of Americans said, yes, we’re better off than we were five years ago.
So, people’s assessment of their own financial situation turns out to be kind of driven by narratives that are floating out there.
Stop the tape.
For Krugman — or any Democrat — to suggest that Republicans are driven by narratives is laugh-out-loud hypocrisy to the max. I mean whose narratives called Trump “Hitler,” “fascist,” “white supremacist,” and warned (lied to) the American public that the now-president would round up his “enemies” and ship them off to “concentration camps”?
After Solman noted that Krugman supported President Biden’s manufacturing investment policies to ostensibly help regions hurt by trade and China, yet many Democrat voters in those areas crossed party lines and supported Trump in November, he asked the bitter little dude: “Did they reject the [Biden] policy?”
Krugman responded:
Maybe, or maybe they just didn’t really attribute it to Biden or whatever, although I think we are seeing a dynamic now, which is that it’s going to be harder than some Republicans think to reverse those policies, that people may not have given Biden credit for that new battery factory in your town, but they will get really angry if the battery factory closes because we have cut off the subsidies.
More Klugman pipe dreams, or reality?
Poll after poll shows a strong majority of Americans support Trump’s policies — Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) results, and Border Czar Tom Homan’s continuing raids to arrest and deport illegal aliens, chief among them — yet Krugman continues to try to wiggle his way out his dire pre-election predictions rather than give Trump and DOGE even the slightest bit of credit.
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Just for grins, here are a few more “highlights” from Krugman during the interview:
Trump promised to bring prices down, which is a promise that he immediately abandoned as soon as he won. But that — so, that would have appealed to low-income voters as a promise.
Dude, Trump’s been back in office less than a month. What did the Biden-Harris administration do about high prices through four miserable years?
And, also, there’s a lot of confounding of income and education and paying attention. We know that Trump won heavily among people who pay very little attention to the news.
I love it that the left continues to think a majority of conservative “pay very little attention to the news.” If so, Mr. Krugman, why does Fox News continue to blow the doors of fthe ratings of CNN and MSNBC, often combined?
It’s very important to me, given my sort of dual career, to be able to weigh in on ongoing discussions of economics in a way that you can’t do in an 800-word column written for a general audience. And so I had a newsletter at The Times, which was summarily canceled. They said I was writing too much.
Or, Mr. Krugman, perhaps your snotty, far-left views even became too much for The New York Times.
Finally:
I’m most worried about that 2024 may have been our last real election, I mean, given that the — what appears to be a loyalty purge of the federal bureaucracy, what appears to be unwillingness of the Trump administration to obey court orders, maybe historians will look back and say that American democracy ended in January 2025.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trump’s going to “outlaw” presidential elections, live forever, and reign over America to a degree that will make even Hitler look like an amateur.
And as for historians, please. Those of us who pay attention to most historians are well aware of the notion of revisionist history.
I’m done. Krugman wears me out.
