In his latest hate-Trump rambling December 17 Substack column, former New York Times columnist Krugman sneered, “An A+++++ Economy, My A++,” mocking the president’s assessment of the current state of the economy.
It’s worth a reminder that Krugman just recently had the audacity to call Bidenomics the “triumph that nobody appreciated” in November. That’s basically the equivalent of saying the Biden economy was “A+++++.” Cue the canned laughter.
He’s the same person that gaslit Americans who were struggling under President Joe Biden’s overbloated multitrillion-dollar tax-and-spend spree that they were only complaining because they “hate” Biden. We’d advise him to sit this one out. Krugman wouldn’t know an “A+++++ economy” if it bit his “A++.”
Oblivious to the obvious -- that Trump’s second language is hyperbole -- Krugman continued his pro-Biden babbling that “First, the economy that Trump inherited when he took office was in much better shape than today’s economy, with lower unemployment combined with faster job growth, and inflation trending down.”
Did you catch that? Krugman somehow wants to be taken seriously on his critique of Trump while still openly defending the inflationary disaster Bidenomics inflicted on the U.S. economy in the first place! Jeez-a-loo! Not even a low-budget comedian could come up with as bad a joke as this one.
And yet, prior to Trump’s prime-time address, he whined that “[t]he details of his speech haven’t been announced, but it’s a good guess that he intends to gaslight Americans yet again, claiming that things are going well. They aren’t.”
Krugman’s entire argument was based on distorting the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which showed the U.S. economy adding 64,000 new jobs, eclipsing the 45,000 estimate by Dow Jones economists, and the unemployment rate ticking up to 4.6 percent. In Krugman’s predictably warped, uncontextualized world, the “data show a weak labor market.” But he took it further: “The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market.”
Here’s the problem, as pointed out by election and economic forecast firm Quantus Insights on X December 16, “The ‘weak jobs’ narrative doesn’t hold up when you look at the whole. From Sept–Nov, payrolls fell 41K, but private-sector jobs rose +121K while government employment dropped –162K.” In addition, noted Quantus, “Since April, private employment is up +333K, native-born employment +998K (Household Survey), and the native-born E/P ratio has edged higher. Add Atlanta Fed GDPNow at +3.5% Q3 growth and this looks like normalization after public-sector excess, not economic collapse or even a recession.”
Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni also repudiated the Krugman-esque line of reasoning, arguing in a December 16 column that “alleged weakness [in the job market] is almost entirely confined to government bureaucrats and foreign workers, while private industry is employing more Americans.” This, argued Antoni, is part of Trump’s gambit to reprivatize the economy away from the public sector. In fact, wrote Antoni, this was “the best November ever for employment among native-born Americans, up more than 2.6 million over the last 12 months and setting a record, albeit on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. Conversely, the number of foreign-born workers with jobs declined over this period by 21,000.”
See? Context matters, Krugman. But does anyone really think he cares? Not likely.
The disgraced Krugman even bent the Sahm Rule — which stipulates that a recession begins when the three-month moving average of unemployment "rises by 0.50 percentage points or more relative to the minimum of the three-month averages from the previous 12 months” — into a pretzel in order to buoy his prediction that a recession was nigh. While conceding that a strict application of the Sahm rule isn’t possible due to the lack of availability of October’s numbers vis-a-vis, he then dubiously concocted his own version of the Sahm Rule to prove his point:
But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.
But, as always, Krugman is being very hypocritical. In his latest piece, he’s using the Sahm rule to predict a recession. But when the Sahm Rule was about to be triggered under Biden’s economy in July 2024, Krugman downplayed and said in a July 30, 2024 New York Times column that “As Sahm has explained, her rule wasn’t designed to predict recessions.” He continued: “So are we entering a recession? A number of observers, including Sahm herself, have suggested that this time may be a bit different.”
Double standard much? But don’t expect Krugman to exercise any modicum of logical consistency. That concept is about as foreign to him as using common sense.
