Free Republic

In the wake of embarrassing emails released via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and an even more embarrassing FBI report, Hillary Clinton supporters have responded angrily toward any concerns raised by these new releases. An elitist dribble of condescension masquerading as a pro-Clinton Op-Ed written by economist Paul Krugman was an inevitable reaction to this negative publicity. This “Hillary or else” mentality was aggressively advocated by Krugman in Clinton’s first presidential campaign against Obama and even more so throughout the 2016 Democratic primaries. Krugman perpetuated the Bernie Bros smear campaign by alleging on several occasions that Sanders’ support stemmed...

Paul Krugman is confused. He can’t figure out why Americans are so gloomy that they might vote for Donald Trump in November. From the columnist’s perch at the New York Times, things in America seem A-okay: If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park. There are people of all ages, and, yes, all races exercising, strolling hand in hand, playing with their dogs, kicking soccer balls and throwing Frisbees. There are a few homeless people, but the overall atmosphere...

Now, I’m not a political scientist or polling expert, nor do I even try to play one on TV. But I am fairly numerate, and I assiduously follow real experts like The Times’s Nate Cohn. And they’ve taught me some basic rules that I keep seeing violated. First, at a certain point you have to stop reporting about the race for a party’s nomination as if it’s mainly about narrative and “momentum.” That may be true at an early stage, when candidates are competing for credibility and dollars. Eventually, however, it all becomes a simple, concrete matter of delegate counts....

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a bit apoplectic that the left, which has always wanted single-payer health care, is still pushing for single-payer health care. "Why," he frets, "do we hear not just conservatives but also many progressives trashing President Obama's biggest policy achievement?" He goes on to say, "A lot of what I hear from the left is not so much a complaint about how the reform falls short as outrage that private insurers get to play any role. The idea seems to be that any role for the profit motive taints the whole effort." Krugman says...

ew York Times columnist Paul Krugman produced another doozy of column on Friday in which he warns that climate change will result in armaggedon and it will be fault of those dastardly Republicans. The opening paragraph of Krugman's column predicts, "Future historians — if there are any future historians — will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning...

So Jeb Bush is finally going after Donald Trump. Over the past couple of weeks the man who was supposed to be the front-runner has made a series of attacks on the man who is. Strange to say, however, Mr. Bush hasn’t focused on what’s truly vicious and absurd — viciously absurd? — about Mr. Trump’s platform, his implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil. Instead, Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his...

Paul Krugman is so frustrated by the lack of support for another round of stimulus spending that he's now calling for a fake alien invasion of the United States to spur a World War II-style defense buildup.

<p>That is, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the world economy right now is that governments aren’t deep enough in debt.</p>

Memo to pollsters: while I’m having as much fun as everyone else watching the unsinkable Donald defy predictions of his assured collapse, what I really want to see at this point is a profile of his supporters. What characteristics predispose someone to like this guy, as opposed to accepting the establishment candidates? The reason I’d like to see such a poll is that I suspect that both conservative and liberal pundits are still getting the Trump phenomenon wrong. And yes, that’s the kind of statement — hey, left and right both wrong! — that I usually hate when other pundits...

We have all known someone who, having paid an exorbitant sum for a car that seems to spend a lot of time in the shop, insists it’s the best automobile he’s ever owned. That´s Paul Krugman where Obamacare is concerned. His psychological and professional investment in the perversely titled Affordable Care Act is such that he cannot bring himself to admit that he bought a lemon. And like the guy with the pricey car that keeps breaking down, his claims about the dysfunctional law are becoming so preposterous that they are literally provoking laughter when he makes them in public....

Liberal economist Paul Krugman appears to have cherry-picked data to support his belief in the Federal Reserve’s ability to stabilize the economy. In a recent column responding to another economist, Krugman included a chart purporting to show that central bank interest rates have a significant effect on long-term investments. Yet in a post for the Pragmatic Capitalism blog, entrepreneur and financial expert Cullen Roche asserts that Krugman “decided to remove 20 years worth of data because it fit his argument better.” And it appears to check out.

Paul Krugman: Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago. But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on. Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who...

Ah: I see that there was a Twitter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethokoukis, and others over why Republicans don’t acknowledge that Ben Bernanke helped the economy, and claim credit. Pethokoukis — who presumably gets to talk to quite a few Republicans from his perch at AEI — offers a fairly amazing explanation: B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spending and artificially propping up debt-heavy economy in need of Mellon-esque liquidation Yep: that dastardly Bernanke was preventing us from having a financial crisis, curse him. Actually, there’s a lot of evidence that this was an important part of the...

If you are masochistic enough to read the “reporting” of the legacy media on Obamacare, you will have noticed a spate of recent stories with titles like the following from CNBC: “Health spending post-Obamacare seen $2.5 trillion lower.” This headline is not only awkwardly worded. It is, like the article over which it appears, misleading. It misrepresents a new study from the left-leaning Urban Institute concerning projected health care spending in a way that suggests the nation has saved enormous amounts of money thanks to the “Affordable Care Act.” This is absurd, of course, but it highlights an underappreciated element...

resident Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech, called for a minimum-wage hike and for government-mandated paid family and medical leave. "We are the only advanced country on Earth," said the President, "that doesn't guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers." On the minimum wage, Obama issued this challenge: "And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it. If not, vote to give millions of the...

A book by a French economist who became a darling of 99 percenters and his lefty peers is riddled with errors, cherry-picked data and flawed premises, according to two new studies. Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21st Century,” which New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade,” calls for an 80 percent income tax to stop wealth inequality from increasing. The book earned its author an invitation to the White House to meet with Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. ... ... The recent...

Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you? It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball...

In a chilling 2010 column, Paul Krugman declared: “peak oil has arrived.” So it’s really not surprising that the national average for a gallon of gas has fallen to $2.77 this week – in 10 states it was under $2.60 – and analysts predict we’re going to dip below the two-dollar mark soon. U.S. oil is down to $75 a barrel, a drop of more than $30 from the 52-week high. Meanwhile, the Institute for Energy Research estimates that we have enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity needs for around 575 years at current fuel demand and...

In fact, it’s hard to see who else you could have hired. Modeling health reform is a very detail-driven business: you need a detailed statistical representation of the population, together with detailed estimates of behavioral responses to incentives. Gruber has spent years developing such a model, which is maintained and update at considerable expense. Who else could bring the same resources to bear? Well, I guess the administration could have turned to the Lewin Group, but aside from the fact that Gruber has such sterling academic credentials, Lewin is owned by United Healthcare. In other words, Gruber is a real...

When it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. . . . Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn't mean the same thing that it used to ... . . . Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like.