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Economist Paul Krugman thinks Donald Trump's presidential campaign actually gets a few things right. Krugman previously derided the Republican real-estate mogul as a "belligerent, loudmouth racist with not an ounce of compassion." But in a Monday op-ed in The New York Times, the left-leaning writer praised Trump's "heresies" from Republican orthodoxy when it comes to economic policy. "So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he's given credit for being?" Krugman asked, making it clear that he is still not a Trump supporter. "Not at all — he is exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems...

Republican presidential candidates. who have had to seek contributions from a handful of wealthy contributors, want to cut Social Security. Average Americans love the program; the superwealthy don’t. Something strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it’s interesting to ask why. The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of...

Source: Source information located at the bottom of column. First the good news. The federal governmentÂ’s tax receipts are coming in at a rate somewhat higher than what was expected a few months ago. That means a shut-down-the-government debt limit stalemate will be pushed back until November or December. It also means that the federal debt will actually decline a bit this year. Now for the bad news. We are experiencing the calm before the storm. The Congressional Budget Office reported Tuesday that although our fiscal situation is improving, by 2018 we will snap back to swelling deficits and unsustainable...

The deficit is estimated to more than double in 10 years, which is projected to push debt held by the public up to 77 percent as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.Despite an anticipated rise in tax collection, the CBO predicts that the government will continue to spend outside of its means. The CBO warns that later in the coming decade, growth in government spending will “outstrip” growth in the economy.According to the CBO, by the end of this year, federal revenues are expected to climb to $3.3 trillion—or 18.2 percent of...

This was written by a Nobel prize winning economist without a trace or sarcasm, irony or humor. It is excerpted, and presented without commentary.From the New York Times:Debt Is Good... the point simply that public debt isn’t as bad as legend has it? Or can government debt actually be a good thing?Believe it or not, many economists argue that the economy needs a sufficient amount of public debt out there to function well. And how much is sufficient? Maybe more than we currently have. That is, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the...

In the view of The New York Times and other beacons of the liberal media, President Barack Obama’s policies are a resounding success and he rarely makes a misstep. The harmful effects of his policies, as well as his many scandals, must be ignored or covered up with misleading statistics and deceitful reporting that preserve his radical, left-wing legacy, and even make it sound mainstream. Members of the media often follow the lead of the Times in choosing the angles for their own reporting. And, as we noted last year, Paul Krugman’s columns for that paper, while opinion pieces, reflect...

It’s true, as Paul Krugman says, that Greece and Puerto Rico are not in exactly the same position. PR is bust to some extent, yes, but it’s not in the middle of a catastrophe, as Greece is. However, there is also a similarity in their situations, one that’s extremely instructive. They’re both suffering from being in a monetary policy zone, a currency zone, that isn’t really suitable for their circumstances. One of the two is in a fiscal policy union as well as that monetary union, the other is not. And it’s long been agreed that if you’re to have...

Rick PerryÂ’s entry into the presidential race draws natural attention to the Texas economy. While Perry was governor, Texas created more than three of every ten new jobs in the entire country. And even though a decline in energy prices has slowed things a bit, over the last four years Texas was the third among the 50 states in job creation. Perry and others credit low taxes and sensible regulation for TexasÂ’ economic success. The Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees. Last week they wrote: The Tax Foundation ranks TexasÂ’s business climate tenth best, and the stateÂ’s growth spurt vindicates...

A few years ago New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was frequently heralding the Veterans Health Administration as a model of medical improvement in America. It is, he wrote, "a huge policy success story," that has "achieved a remarkable combination of rising quality and successful cost control." One wonders if Krugman is aware of this story.

Health Reform: A year ago, we were told with great certainty that ObamaCare critics had it all wrong when they warned about coming premium rate shocks. Then came the eye-popping rate requests for next year.

Someone sent me an email Wednesday evening with some details on the Paul Krugman response to James Montier, which I discussed here. I had previously stated that the Krugman response was lacking meat. But it's actually worse than that. It's actually highly misleading and appears intentionally so. In the post, Dr. Krugman tries to show how much interest rates matter by comparing the Fed Funds Rate with Housing Starts. He shows a chart and declares that there appears to be a strong correlation. Except, as this emailer notes, he appears to have shifted the chart to make it appear as...

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...

It was enough to make a blogger in mom's basement spit out his Cheetos in surprise. On today's Morning Joe income redistributionist and global climate kvetcher Prof. Jeffrey Sachs praised the UK Conservatives for creating jobs via an austerity budget. In a second surprise, Sachs criticized fellow lefty traveler Paul Krugman. Said Sachs of the Conservatives: "they governed well . . . they got the economy going again. They got it stabilized, they got the debt crisis Britain was facing under control and they created a lot of jobs and they got rewarded last night." And a bit later, the...

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...

Continuing my meditation on Brad DeLong’s meditation on the fiscal future. Brad doesn’t just argue that governments should be bigger in the future; he also argues that governments have historically not had enough debt, and should have more. Why? Because, he says, r-g—the difference between the real rate of interest on government debt and the rate of economic growth—has been consistently negative. Why is this significant? Well, we normally imagine that if a government engages in deficit spending now, it will have to engage in compensating austerity of some form later—even if it doesn’t plan to pay off the debt,...

Paul Krugman, a few years ago, wrote at length to extol the magnum opus of science fiction grandmaster, Isaac Asimov, theFoundation Trilogy. Prof. Krugman’s reflections thereon are of keen interest. I met Asimov once, 40+ years ago, at a world science fiction convention. I even got him to autograph my Science Fiction Book Club copy of “The Foundation Trilogy.” This compilation of three novels is an SF classic. I, then and since, found it too dull to read in full. (Asimov’s I, Robot then was much more engaging to this long-ago SF geek. But nothing Asimov wrote really rivaled Heinlein’s...

Here we go again. One of the High Priests of the so-called "reality-based community" has for the umpteenth time pronounced Obamacare a great success, asserting that people who believe otherwise (like, for example, the majority of the American people) have either been deceived, or are liars. Paint-by-numbers acerbic Leftist, reactionary smear artist, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls Obamacare horror stories "imaginary disasters," made up from whole cloth to scare people and undermine a law that's working and helping people.  We've spent quite a lot of time refuting variants of this argument in recent years, producing detailed responses to President Obama, Harry Reid, and two...

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...

Paul Krugman has become an embarrassment to the economics profession. Despite his Nobel Prize and despite his previous high regard in the profession, his twice-a-week editorials in The New York Times are causing even progressive economists to treat him as somewhat of a kook.Since 2011, the United States has followed what Krugman correctly calls a policy of “austerity.” For example, the federal budget deficit has declined from 8.4 percent of GDP in 2011 to a predicted 2.9 percent of GDP for all of 2014. All along the way Paul Krugman protested that such policies would prolong the recession and even...

French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the surprise best-selling Capital in the 21st Century turned down France's top award, the Legion D'Honneur. "I do not think it is the government's role to decide who is honourable", said Piketty. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called it "the most important economics book of the year - and maybe of the decade". Krugman likely says that because he believes in Piketty's socialist solutions to income inequality. Thomas Piketty's Capital Review Piketty's book is a massive 696-page slog. Fortunately, Harvard Business Review offers this synopsis: Piketty’s “Capital,” in a Lot Less than 696 Pages.The...