On Friday’s PBS airing of Amanpour & Co., host Christiane Amanpour introduced “the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, who's written his last column for The New York Times, after 25 years of sharp and often indispensable takes on major issues that shape America and the world.”
Stop laughing, please.
NewsBusters has compiled decades of research proving Krugman’s knee-jerk partisanship is the opposite of sharp, and his conventional wisdom opinions far from indispensable. And he continues to claim Bidenomics has been vindicated. None of this penetrated the liberal PBS bubble, which didn’t offer the economist a single challenging question.
The retiring columnist and laughingstock for conservatives talked to show contributor Michel Martin, who first congratulated him on “this chapter of your very distinguished career.”
Krugman proceeded to brag on himself, mentioning the Iraq War and “the debate over Social Security privatization in 2005.” Martin's claim that Krugman had been just as tough on Democrats and liberals didn’t hold water, as she herself noted – Krugman’s only complaint about Democrats was when he thought they weren’t pushing sufficiently ultra-liberal economic policies.
Martin: You have been critical equally of initiatives on the Democratic side – Democratic-slash-progressive side, when you thought they were ill considered and didn't go far enough. And I wondered is that harder in a way?
Krugman: That hurts much more. I mean, I was practically tearing my hair out. You can go back and look at what I was writing just before and just after President Obama took office, and I was tearing my hair out over the obviously, seemed to me, inadequate size of his economic stimulus plans and even participated in meetings with government officials, and they didn't do it. And so, no, it hurts much more when you are -- I have no illusion that anything I write is that are going to persuade Donald Trump of something, but when you fail to persuade Barack Obama, it hurts more.
On air, Krugman recorded his ludicrous first draft of history -- that the economic policy of the Biden presidency would be vindicated by historians. Yes, that same one that resulted in runaway inflation and help cost the Democrats the presidency in 2024.
Krugman: Here's the deeply unpopular opinion that will, I think, become orthodoxy a few decades from now, which is that Biden and his team actually managed the economy extremely well. It's going to be like Harry Truman's. There'll be a resurrection of his reputation. Because they learned from the mistakes. Obama went too soft, too weak on the economy in 2009. And as a result, it took years to recover. And Biden said they understood, which Obama didn't, that they really had one shot at taking strong measures. And so, they did, they spent a lot of money, which temporarily boosted inflation, although in the end, cumulative inflation in the U.S. is similar to that -- of the whole rest of the world….
Krugman's Biden prediction will no doubt turn out to be as visionary as his previous predictions about the failing American economy under Trump, or the Internet's effect on the economy.
When Martin prodded him why Biden’s policy remains politically unpopular, he tried and failed not to be condescending.
Krugman: If you look at who voted which way in the election, basically people who pay attention to the news supported Harris by a strong margin, and people who don't supported Trump by a strong margin. So, a lot of it is just plain, it didn't filter through. And look, but a little bit more to less contemptuous -- if you like, you know, that can come across as a really talking down to people, which I try to avoid doing [Editor’s Note: Really?] but the -- we know, this is one of those things that's been documented again and again, if prices go up and wages also go up, people think that they earned the wage increase and that the price increase was done to them. And the -- you know, which is not the economist model. We think about wage price spirals and think of them as being kind of related. And -- but we did have a shocking, fairly brief, roughly two-year period of elevated inflation, which was probably not even U.S. policies because it happened everywhere….
Host Amanpour wrapped up the segment with nauseatingly fulsome praise.
Amanpour: And we all benefited so much from his wisdom and his columns. Long may they continue wherever they are.
