Longtime readers of mine are familiar with my overwhelming disdain for Paul Krugman, the Opinion section ultra-hack at The New York Times. I've lost count of how many columns I've written about this partisan lapdog.
Krugman fancies himself a genius's genius because he once won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. That's a Nobel-adjacent prize — he's not a laureate. Still, it's quite an achievement in his chosen field.
It doesn't mean he knows anything outside of that chosen field, however.
For most of the past two years, I've been writing about Krugman's stream of finger-wagging articles telling the American public that they aren't really suffering under Bidenomics. He'll bombard readers with metrics that Ted and Susan in flyover country don't give one whit about and insist that the they — along with all of the rest of the rubes in the hinterlands — just don't know how good they've got it.
I will concede that Krugman knows economics better than I do. His political hot takes leave a lot to be desired though. He's an insulated, leftwing propaganda pimp who is so far removed from the experiences of everyday Americans that he may as well be writing from Pluto.
In all the years that I've been reading and mocking Krugman, I've never seen anything as Coastal Media Bubble™ fantastical as this headline of his that I stumbled upon Tuesday afternoon: "Should Biden Downplay His Own Success?"
I checked. Krugman is, in fact, referring to Joe Biden. I thought for a moment there might be some Biden in Ireland who was having success as a county clerk.
Before we get into the meat of this lunatic missive of Krugman's, I would just like to point out that the very notion that Biden has a success that could be downplayed is bat**** crazy. Call your therapist, professor, you've got issues that need to be dealt with. You may want to hit up a neurologist while you're at it.
Let's get to some classic Krugman reasoning now.
Which brings me to a point I’ve been pounding on for a while that bears repeating: There’s overwhelming evidence that most Americans’ negative views about the economy don’t reflect their lived experience.
Here’s a relatively new example: fast food. Recently, the online lending marketplace LendingTree released the results of a survey in which nearly 80 percent of Americans said that inflation has turned fast food into a luxury they’re forced to consume less often. And indeed, fast food prices have gone up quite a bit in recent years.
But they haven’t surged to the extent that legend has it.
There he goes again with his continued assertion that we are misinterpreting our own financial situations. More on that in a moment.
Krugman then goes on to lecture us about how the price of a Big Mac hasn't gone up as much as everyone thinks it has. He admits that the 21% increase is "substantial," but that "it’s less than the rise in the median worker’s earnings over the same period of time."
That's his big win: it sucks, but not as much as everyone thinks it sucks.
Sitting in his ivory tower, Krugman doesn't worry about things like the fact that rents have skyrocketed into the stratosphere and that the only young people who can afford to buy homes for the first time are heirs and heiresses who have just come into their trust funds.
The regular folks who Krugman delights in heaping disdain upon are painfully aware of this.
Krugman's conclusion is that Biden and his administration have been — I kid you not — telling the truth about the economy all along.
Maybe economists don't have very good vocabularies. Krugman should look up the word "truth."
And then call that neurologist.
