It finally happened. The New York Times’s ego-maniacal and perpetually wrong economics columnist is finally divorcing himself from his propaganda-mill column after nearly 25 years.
The Times Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury drafted the company eulogy for Krugman’s career there, and the over the top praise for his faulty economic crystal ball was nothing short of comical.
“The authoritative voice. The lively writing. The direct style. The clear hand guiding readers through a thicket of policy, data and trade-offs,” read Kingsbury’s slobbering statement. “Paul is an important figure in the recent history of Times Opinion. Time and again, he took on the big fights, grappled with policy deeply and seriously, held the powerful to account and spoke hard truths.”
Cue the canned laughter.
This is the same Krugman who spent the past four years selling the snake oil of Bidenomics to the public as some sort of economic panacea while habitually hoodwinking Americans on the devastating inflationary crisis those undergirding policies helped create. “[S]poke hard truths?” Good grief. Did Kingsbury have to write this tongue-in-cheek?
But consumers of news shouldn’t expect anything less from the “economist” who’s essentially made his multimillion-dollar career off of deceiving the public and being on the opposite end of reality, even if it meant clearly looking ridiculous.
In a statement, MRC founder and president Brent Bozell blasted Krugman’s nightmarish tenure at the so-called “newspaper-of-record.” “Krugman’s embarrassing record of injecting leftism into his terrible economic analyses has sacrificed his own credibility. The only thing Americans will miss about Krugman’s column is its comic relief. Good riddance.”
As Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro noted in an X post commemorating the Krugman legacy, “No man has ever been wronger for longer than Paul Krugman.”
To that end, MRC Business would like to pay tribute to Krugman’s media career by documenting a non-exhaustive list of some of the disgruntled columnist’s dumbest economic hot takes over the years. Enjoy!
1. By 2005, the Internet’s Effect on the Economy Will Be No Greater than the Fax Machine (1998)
Krugman’s wildly-off prediction about the impact of the internet on the U.S. economy in 1998 is arguably his most infamous display of abject incompetence to this day.
In 1998, Krugman audaciously wrote for Red Herring magazine that “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe's law’"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other!”
Here’s the kicker: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.” The preceding sentence alone was enough to mutate Krugman’s forecasting abilities into a running joke for the foreseeable future. [Emphasis added.]
Even leftist fact-checker Snopes conceded that “[t]he quote is so infamous, in fact, that it has turned into a meme often wielded against him by people hoping to discredit other pronouncements Krugman has made.” As Snopes concluded, “Internet growth has done nothing but boom since the late 1990s.” In addition, “the economic effects of the Internet — which has come to play a central role in virtually every aspect of life in every developed country — have been nothing short of transformative,” Snopes continued.
2. Krugman Called for Space Alien Invasion to Lead to Massive Defense Buildup to Stimulate the Economy (2011)
Krugman’s attempts at a rhetorical exercise about space aliens saving the American economy is undercut by the fact that he argues that the notion should be taken seriously.
During an August 2011 segment on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, Krugman actually advocated that space aliens attack earth, requiring a massive defense buildup by the United States that would in effect stimulate the economy. No, he was not kidding.
“If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” Krugman bleated. He then tried to liken his idea to an episode from Twilight Zone: “[T]here was a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
Uh, okay space cadet Krugman. This logic is just “to infinity and beyond”- level stuff.
3. The Stock Market Will ‘Never’ Recover Under Trump (2016)
Who can forget the classic gem Krugman eked out following then-candidate Donald Trump’s astounding 2016 victory?
When markets began to go into freefall after Trump was emerging as the electoral victor in 2016, Krugman initially stated in The New York Times live election blog that “[i]t really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?” Krugman further suggested that “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” This was off-the-rails even by Krugman’s standards apparently, as he was forced to rescind his prediction just a day later in a tweet, but still double-down on his Armageddon messaging: “Having some second thoughts about my global recession call. As with Brexit, the short-run case isn't that clear. Still a disaster.”
Krugman’s initial forecast, however, would age like a smelly cheese.
Just a year after Krugman’s initial take from his crystal ball, economist Mark Perry reported for American Enterprise Institute that the stock market had the “best one year return since 1944” at the time. It’s like Krugman was trying to channel his inner inverse predictor Jim Cramer.
4. Krugman Claimed ‘Impeaching Trump Is Good for the Economy’
Need a way to shoe-horn some wild economics hot take into a constitutional crisis? Paul Krugman’s your guy!
During the first heavily politicized impeachment of President Trump, Krugman got straight to the point in a September 2019 column. “Impeaching Trump Is Good for the Economy,” read Krugman’s insane headline. He suggested impeachment “will slow down the administration’s war on competence” and " have a chilling effect on the Trumpian project of government degradation." He continued down that cesspool of logic, “So paralysis is good. The more time Trump appointees spend worrying about potential prosecution rather than planning loyalty purges, the better off all of us, from ordinary citizens to giant corporations, will be.” Uh, what?
5. Krugman’s Inaugural Advice to Joe Biden: ‘Don’t Worry About Inflation’ (2021)
Prior to President Joe Biden officially taking office, it turned out that Krugman was on the wrong side of the inflation debate before the inflation crisis was even a thing.
Krugman whipped up his own “rules” for Bidenomics just six days before Biden’s inauguration in 2021. One of the rules Krugman carelessly spit out really needs no explanation in retrospect: “Rule #3: Don’t worry about inflation.” Oof! Where to begin with this? It wouldn’t be long after this textbook case of bad advice would be greeted by America’s war with a 40-year high inflation disaster. After about four years of Bidenomics, consumer prices have skyrocketed 20 percent on average and Americans are left struggling to pay their bills and save money.
A September 2024 Bankrate study found, “The past 16 months of ‘real’ wage growth — as economists have called it — haven’t been enough to offset the 25 months where prices were rising disproportionately faster than Americans’ paychecks.”
Even while the nation was grappling with the wrath of high prices, Krugman continued to insist for months that it was just a transitory phenomenon, which — as is typical with any of Krugman’s statements — turned out to be flat-out false.
Krugman would act dumbfounded in January 2022 when his prima facie dismissals of the inflation threat went horrifically awry. “[L]ife comes at you fast, as I say, I mean, I don't know what the opposite of instant gratification is, but I've had instant antigratification in the sense that that I made an inflation call and it went [sic] wrong pretty fast, and I think we all have to try to understand what the hell has been going on,” he said.
Newsflash: He still doesn’t know “what the hell has been going on” with inflation.
6. Krugman Called the GOP ‘Economic Terrorists’ (2023)
Have legitimate concerns about the national debt? Well, you may just be one of those GOP “economic terrorists,” according to Krugman.
Krugman’s Jan. 19, 2023 column railed at GOP congressional members seeking spending concessions from President Joe Biden on the debt ceiling issue. “Don’t Try to Appease Economic Terrorists,” the headline read. Yes, Krugman actually used the word “terrorists.”
He sugar-coated the issue, falsely claiming that raising the debt ceiling “simply allows the government to honor its promises, which include everything from paying interest on its debt to sending checks to Social Security recipients.” He lectured that “[n]o, raising the debt limit doesn’t give the president free rein to spend whatever he wants.” Apparently Krugman didn’t get a hint that this was just dumb semantics. Raising the debt ceiling ad infinitum gives the government a pass to borrow as much as it wants to service the current debt, thereby sinking the U.S. economy further into debt by racking up the bills.
The national debt, as of Dec. 9, 2024, is over a whopping $36.2 trillion. Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni pointed out in a Dec. 6 post on X that “To date, the Biden admin has run up federal debt by $8.4 trillion while running down Treasury cash by $840 billion - that's a total of nearly $9.3 trillion in the red!”
But “terrorists,” in Krugman’s view, include legislators that dare to make a big stink about this asinine level of government spending. Talk about a stretch!
7. Krugman to Hurting Americans: You're Not Struggling in This Economy, You Just ‘Hate’ Biden (2024)
Krugman isn’t shy about wearing his elitism on his sleeve, especially when it comes to gaslighting Americans by making it seem like their economic turmoil under Biden wasn’t real and was simply a byproduct of deep-rooted hatred for the so-called “best president of my adult life.”
Krugman was pressed to explain why polls continue to show the Biden economy numbers in the toilet by MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks during the Jan. 9, 2024 edition of iGen Politics.
Instead of acknowledging the real plight facing citizens forced to adapt to a much more expensive economic environment, Krugman settled for nutty condescension, “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.’” Ah, so Americans were just making up the fact that they have to dole out an extra $11,000 a year on average just to maintain a standard of living they had in 2021, eh economist worth $5 million?
MRC Business will surely miss Krugman, since his godforsaken column never failed to give our writers plenty to work with, and it definitely gave our readers a bellyful of laughs in the process. Hasta la vista!
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 1 (800) 698-4637 and congratulate it for finally distancing itself from Krugman’s economic nonsense.
