Uh, Oh … Krugman Predicts Good Economic News

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Uh, Oh … Krugman Predicts Good Economic News

Published: Thursday, January 7th, 2021 @ 12:51 pm
By: John Locke Foundation ( More Entries )

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Mitch Kokai.

Editors at Issues and Insights aren't too thrilled about the latest economic projections from Paul Krugman.

New York Times economics pundit Paul Krugman, who has made a handsome living for decades being wrong, recently predicted economic times may get better, a lot better, under Joe Biden.

Is he right? In the past, the impeccably progressive Krugman's ideological blinders have prevented him from seeing reality even in his specialty, economics. That's especially true when it comes to any policy or idea emanating from Republicans, for whom he has a special animus.

Truth is, Krugman has been consistently wrong in most of his predictions, especially about major economic trends. And his errors really ratcheted up after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. He Krugman predicted nothing but gloom and doom.

Days after the stunning defeat of Krugman's favorite Hillary Clinton, the Nobel Prize winner predicted Trump's win would lead to a global recession "with no end in sight." That was obviously wrong. He continued to make faulty predictions in 2017 and 2018, guided more by political vitriol and bile than by his own economic training. The more he hated, the worse his forecasts.

But the boom year of 2019, before the pandemic, really told the tale. That year, the economy was clearly roaring, with unemployment sliding to near-record lows for all Americans. Minorities, in particular African-Americans and Hispanics, saw their unemployment rates hit all-time lows, while incomes for those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder and the middle class grew fastest of all.

The stock market soared as new technologies created innovative products and services, taxes were cut, and excessive regulations were slashed. Economically, it was the best year of the 21st century.

And yet, as columnist David Harsanyi pointed out well before the pandemic, Krugman's economic prognostications all during this extraordinary year were consistently glum, and wrong.

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