I & I Editorial Board‘The war on inflation is over,” wrote Paul (Nobel Prize-Winning-Economist) Krugman last week in a post on X. “We won, at very little cost.” The only thing missing was a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner.
But like the unfinished Iraq war that George W. Bush bragged about from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the inflation battle is far from over. Krugman’s reputation as an economist, on the other hand, should be put in a body bag and shipped to Sweden, along with his Nobel Prize money.
Krugman was mocked for his claim about inflation, and for good reason. To show how we’d allegedly won the war, he had to strip out food, energy, shelter, and used cars. In other words – most of the stuff that people spend money on day to day.
When you do that, the remaining basket of goods went up by just 2.8% year-over-year this September, down from a 6.7% hike the year before.
To be fair to Krugman, this is an index the Bureau of Labor Statistics does track. But Krugman was still being dishonest because he conveniently left out the fact that in the 20 years before Biden, this measure of inflation averaged just 1.6%.
Of course, Krugman could have gone further. He could have counted only those categories that have seen price drops in the past year. The cost of “utility (piped) gas service,” for example, was down almost 20% year-over-year in September. Airfares dropped 13%. Egg prices fell 14.5%.
Heck, he could have used that to warn about deflation dangers ahead.
Of course, even with these recent drops, the cost for “utility (piped) gas service” is still 21% higher than it was when Biden took office and “rescued” the economy. Airfares are up 25%. Eggs are 21% more expensive.
What’s more, there are signs that inflation is accelerating. The overall rate has been climbing again after falling to 3% in June.
For Krugman to say that we won the war on inflation “at little cost” is also an insult to families struggling to make ends meet while paying 20% more for groceries, 53% more for gasoline, 26% more for electricity, 25% more for used cars, 32% more for auto insurance, etc., etc., than when Biden was inaugurated, according to our polling partner TIPP.
No one should be surprised at Krugman’s latest embarrassment. He has been consistently and wildly wrong about inflation for years. Throughout 2021, he told readers that inflation was nothing to worry about. He started early, reassuring the public in January of that year that “the Fed can easily contain any pickup in inflation.”
He extended his losing streak in 2022, such as when he said in April of that year that “inflation will probably fall significantly over the next few months.” It went up the next two months, reaching a peak of 9.1% in June, and was still above 6% by January of this year. It didn’t reach 3% until this June and then started climbing again.
Why has Krugman been so wrong? Simple. He loathes Republicans.
Krugman’s blind hatred of Republicans led him to make a multitude of dumb predictions about the economy under President Donald Trump. He kicked off his campaign right after Trump’s November 2016 election, declaring then that “we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”
What followed was four years of the-sky-is-falling alarms, such as “Why Was Trumponomics a Flop?” and “From Trump Boom to Trump Gloom” and “Here Comes the Trump Slump.” (All those appeared before the wrongheaded COVID lockdowns knocked the legs out from what was, in fact, a strong economic boom under Trump.)
In the past three years, Krugman has continued to gaslight the public, but in the opposite direction, insisting despite all evidence to the contrary that everything is peachy.
Just a few weeks ago, Krugman declared that “the big economic question of the moment is: What went right? How did Goldilocks come to the U.S. economy?”
Then the IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index plunged to 36.3 – a 12-year low, while its Financial Stress Index, which was in the low 30s under Trump, is 68.7 today and climbing.
“The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” says that laureates are chosen for having made “outstanding contributions in economics.”
Krugman might have done solid economic work at one point in his career. But today he’s nothing more than a partisan pugilist who is tarnishing the Nobel name.
The prize committee should demand its $1.4 million in prize money back.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
“The Nobel Foundation Should Ask Paul Krugman For Its Award Back”
1-They should demand it back!
2-This just in; paul krugman’s village just called they want their marxist idiot back!!!!!
A perfect example of letting your political ideology get in the way of the facts!
Krugman is a mental midget. To him the world is a nail and money printing is a hammer. There is nothing that can’t be fixed by printing more money. And he is in complete denial about the damaging ramifications of such an idiotic policy from the deeper impoverishment of the poor, to the destruction of the middle class, to the destruction of freedom and democracy and the empowerment of totalitarianism. He is part of the clueless “intelligentsia”.
We need to correct a common error reporters still make. President George W. Bush was photographed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had a large “Mission Accomplished” sign hanging in the background from the ship’s superstructure. The misconception is that the sign indicated that the war on terror was over. It most certainly was not. However many Navy ships have similar signs and the message was to the sailors, not the country as a whole. It was the ship’s mission and that of her crew that was ‘accomplished.’ The Lincoln was on its way home when 911 happened and the ships deployment extended indefinitely. Indeed, the Lincoln’s tour was one of the longest since WWII. That is what was being celebrated by that sign.
Ah, economists…
It is well said that economics was invented to make astrology seem respectable.
I said this before, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes mean nothing anymore. These used to be a sign of excellence in their fields, now it’s a woke notion of mediocrity just like they are teaching kids all the way through school.
Didn’t Nobel give their award to Obama essentially for getting elected?
They mostly give the awards where well deserved, but occasionally the Nobel committee is quite delusional.
“Krugman might have done solid economic work at one point in his career. But today he’s nothing more than a partisan pugilist who is tarnishing the Nobel name.”
So Krugman is tarnishing the corrosive salts which are all that remain of the once-vaunted Nobel Prize.
Pity.
FJB