It seems impossible for former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to stay out of the limelight and make himself look even more ridiculous.
The insufferable economic dunce-in-chief joined the show Here & Now on National Public Radio to go on a predictable tirade against President Donald Trump’s tariff battle with trading partners, and completely downplaying the significance of trade deficits. NPR asked Krugman during an April 8 segment, “Trump has long criticized U.S. trade deficits with countries including Japan and China. Do trade deficits with individual countries matter?”
Then Krugman had the temerity to accuse Trump of using dumb economics, as if he really has any leg to stand on following the extent to which he simped for the disaster of Bidenomics. “No, just as simple as that. This is all junk economics. I have a trade deficit with my supermarket. I have a trade surplus with my employer. Bilateral trade deficits are all around us. It's how we live.”
Yes, the same person who spent months trying to convince the country that the inflation crisis under Biden was “transitory,” that America would witness a Biden boom, and who told Biden before his inauguration “ Don’t Worry About Inflation” is complaining about so-called “junk economics.” He also even had the audacity to bleat that Biden “created the best job market in a generation.” The level of projection here is just unreal.
Fox Business reported in February that the“U.S. goods deficit soared 14% to $1.2 trillion in 2024, with imports reaching an all-time high of $364.9 billion in December ahead of Trump's return to office,” with significant deficits tied to China, Mexico and Canada.
Krugman further stoked alarmism when asked about the effects of a persistent trade war, ““In the longer run, meaning a year or two from now, it just means increases in prices that will run well ahead of increases in wages. So, we'll be talking about people having less purchasing power. It's a pretty serious cost.”
Oh, so now all of a sudden Krugman is concerned about increased prices running ahead of wages after he effectively treated Americans as being dumb for panning Bidenomics? Research released by Statista in February 2025, found that “[d]espite the level of wage growth reaching 6.7 percent in the summer of 2022, it has not been enough to curb the impact of even higher inflation rates. The federally mandated minimum wage in the United States has not increased since 2009, meaning that individuals working minimum wage jobs have taken a real terms pay cut for the last twelve years.” In January 2025, Statista released another analysis headlined, “Biden's Blemish: Wages Haven't Kept Up With Inflation.”
Was Krugman making a fuss then? Nah. In fact, in 2024, Krugman was too busy telling readers in 2024 that their economic struggles were practically made-up: “A lot of it is simply — a lot of people who say the economy is lousy —what they’re really saying is, ‘I hate the idea that a Democrat is president.’”
Krugman’s comments, of course, were blurted out right before the latest inflation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was released, showing that prices slowed down in March more than expected to 2.4 percent against the projected 2.6 percent increase. Krugman’s comments were also prior to Trump announcing a 90-day tariff pause on 75 countries who did not execute retaliatory actions against his trade policies, while slapping a 125 percent tariff on China to boot, ironically leading to stock markets skyrocketing.
As columnist David Marcus analyzed April 10, “Democrats, and a fair number of free-marketeer conservatives to boot, celebrated Trump ‘caving’ to the pressure of the financial markets. But when the smoke settled, it was clear that, far from folding, Trump had instituted a historic tariff regime, and somehow got a stock market rally out of it.”
Everyone’s freaking out about the tariffs and the stock market dropping, but here’s the deal: This isn’t the end of the economy.
— Dave Ramsey (@DaveRamsey) April 8, 2025
If you're a real investor, you don’t make decisions based on headlines. You think long term. The market is still up over time. Wealth is built by… pic.twitter.com/vlhQ5WRUgI
What the end result of Trump’s trade war is, nobody knows. But there is enough evidence to show that the last person anybody in the media — including NPR — should be looking to for a serious take on the economy’s future is an unhinged ideologue like Krugman who acts like Bidenomics was the best thing since chocolate ice cream. Good grief.
