New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman has spilled much ink over the last year fawning over President Joe Biden's blazing jobs market, and now here comes the boomerang.
In light of the latest bad news that the government vastly overestimated job growth — by a whopping 818,000 jobs — Krugman the blowhard lost all his air. That 818,000 figure is equal to about 30 percent of the jobs growth for the 12-month period ending in March 2024 and represents the largest revision in 15 years. Yet Krugman, during that twelve-month period, was caught up in his own self-medicated political high on how Biden was supposedly “presiding over the best job market America has seen in a generation — specifically since the boom of the late Clinton years” in an April 2023 op-ed. But that’s not the first time he hung himself out to dry like this. Just a few months later, in July 2023, Krugman again praised Biden for “arguably creating the best job market in a generation.”
Heritage Public Finance Economist EJ Antoni noted in an Aug. 21 statement on the massive jobs revision that “[t]he labor market is nowhere near as strong as is being portrayed.” In fact, Antoni warned, “Today’s negative benchmark is the second largest in history after 2009, when the labor market was bottoming out in the Great Recession.” Talk about Krugman’s blatherings aging like a fine, smelly cheese.
Krugman always seems to find some way to make himself look even more ridiculous than he already does. In 2022, MRC Business analyzed how Krugman's three 2021 rules for Bidenomics ended up self-destructing a year later as the nation grappled with a mind-numbing inflation crisis brought on by Biden and the Federal Reserve’s asinine spending policies. The bad humor in each of Krugman’s so-called “rules” that he drafted in January 2021 speak for themselves:
- “Rule #1: Don’t doubt the power of government to help.”
- “Rule #2: Don’t obsess about debt.”
- “Rule #3: Don’t worry about inflation.”
No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. The “rules” comprise the summation of what Krugman considered to be good economics prior to the chaos Americans suffered the past couple of years. Moreover, Krugman’s tally of major misses is occurring right in the middle of his ridiculous habit of looking down his nose and condescending to the struggling American plebeian seeing the Biden economy for the disaster that it’s been. It’s like watching a bad sitcom stuck in a marathon. Krugman’s obsession with the Biden jobs market that ended up eventually getting nuked to smithereens is just the latest episode.
As National Review political correspondent Jim Geraghty pointed out, the latest jaw-dropping jobs revision showed that one of the “dominant narratives in economic reporting” that snake oil salesmen like Krugman helped peddled for the past year — “‘the economy is doing gangbusters with robust job creation, so why are Americans so gloomy about the economy?’ — was, at minimum, flawed.”
Readers should view Krugman’s words like they would inflation: Too many godawful opinions chasing too few realities.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 1 (800) 698-4637 and demand it distance itself from Krugman’s terrible economic takes.
