Purported “Economist” Paul Krugman is a minor celebrity, of sorts. It’s not because some think that he nearly landed the lead in the farcical flick “Clueless,” and it’s not because many suspect he was the unidentified subject of the Rollins Band’s song, “Liar” – though both possibilities seem strong to those who actually understand economics. Kruggy’s “reputation” for goofy takes on productivity and his unending love of government central-planning have become so infamous, two of the world’s best economics teachers, Robert Murphy and Thomas Woods, Jr., had years of fun producing a weekly podcast called “ContraKrugman,” in which they would mock Krugman’s pieces for the New York Times, then they would offer real economics and help people learn.
And it seems as if the folks at the Musk-infused Twitter/X have learned a thing or two from Murphy and Woods – or perhaps they just had the common sense that often is lacking at the NYT…
They recently checked on Krugman’s claims regarding “inflation” being a non-thing, and called him to task for the fantasy.
In an October 12 tweet, Krugman claimed:
“The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost.”
Which not only runs counter to reality, it also is SO counter-factual, is such an “in-your-face” falsehood, it’s an insult, and indicates the utter disrespect and contempt for people that Krugman might hold.
Kruggy mixed his words with a visually deceptive chart of the Consumer Price Index -- covering the start of January, 2022, through the end of September, 2023, and appearing to show declining prices.
Of course, almost instantly, REAL economists such as Peter St. Onge exposed the falsity of the Tweet, noting that the CPI chart did not factor in the sharp month-on-month, year-to-year, compounded price increases in key market goods. Wrote St. Onge about the chart and Krugman’s lame framing of it:
“Excluding everything you buy, inflation is doing amazing.”
And Prof. St. Onge added a clown-face emoji, to boot.
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Such a colorful addition seems appropriate to apply to the Kruggmeister’s tweet, since Kruggman’s chart (some might call it an illusion), omitted those important facts. They’re pretty fundamental. In FACT, they are facts we’ve reported at MRCTV, facts that St. Onge understands, and facts that the Biden Administration repeatedly attempts to hide from Americans.
They also are truths that Musk’s new Twitter/X provided, calling out Krugman for his deceit.
As Charlotte Hazard reports for Just The News:
"’The exclusion of food, shelter, energy, and used cars is misleading,’ the X community notes read. ‘All prices included in CPI show year over year inflation at 3.7% as of September 2023.’"
As noted above, Twitter users who follow MRCTV likely already had read Brittany Hughes’ piece on the price problem, published earlier, on the very same day as Kruggy’s deceptive tweet.
Apart from what the data reveal about price increases caused by central-bank-central-government-fed inflation of the money supply, this cost-rise trend is part of a functional equation, seeing annual price increases that are compounded each year, so it’s not really even the stunning 3.7 percent we’re seeing today that is the only problem. It’s 3.7 percent compounded on a nearly 6.5 percent increase last year, compounded on 7 percent the previous year, and so on.
Which is why I wrote for the Mises Institute about that money-print problem back in 2004, noting that, since the creation of the Federal Reserve, annual price “inflation” has been 2.5 percent, compounded. As PragCap.com noted in 2014, such an increase in the stock of paper/digital “money” (i.e. the Federal Reserve Note we are told to call “the Dollar”) has resulted in it losing nearly 100 percent of its comparable buying power in 100 years.
The only thing that has helped stave off greater deprivation in our lives has been the astounding productivity of people who, decade after decade, have striven in the competitive market to be more productive and get products and services to customers for less. Like throwing “productivity sandbags” in front of a creeping printed-money tide, we still can stand, but the central-bank keeps flooding us with more valueless cash -- funding pork programs and political salaries, and undercutting the important drive for free people to get the value of their trades, rather then being defrauded by government and a government-monopoly bank.
Krugman appears to be oblivious to these important moral and economic facts.
And perhaps that is to be expected, coming from a guy who not only refused to call the Obama-era economic troubles a depression, but who assiduously used the soft term “economic downturn” instead, even as other deceptive “economists” alternated that term with “recession.”
The W. Bush-Obama era “downturn” was not merely a “recession,” the massive decrease in Gross Domestic Product took so long to return to pre-January 2008 levels that it was a Depression. Only recently have some left-leaning economists admitted this.
Of course, honesty in politically-manipulated “economics” is rare, something that the Biden Administration keeps showing us, and which it showed us in dazzling, dizzying, fashion last year, as Bidenista bureaucrats and social media flacks tried to redefine “recession”, and I got to note:
“You’ve been robbed of buying power from an immoral government-central bank nexus that has forced on you its fiat currency, then created trillions through the decades, topped by a titanic $20.354 TRILLION between January of 2020 and November of last year, alone. You’ve been robbed of employment opportunities and business growth due to unconstitutional lockdowns. You’ve been robbed of opportunities to get new inventions, new products, and services – all because the elitists like (Janet) Yellen, Biden, Krugman, and their media friends think that government spending is glorious and that your economic decisions should be directed, compelled, and steered by the state.”
The other positive piece of intellectual ammo we can take from this is that Twitter’s team did a good job, and Krugman did not.
But what are we to expect from a pop-media-adored collectivist who put FDR’s insane make-work absurdity on nitro when, in 2011, he claimed that the only thing needed to get the US out of the Obama-era “economic downturn” was the threat of an alien invasion? After all, he has no problem seeing the government push our resources: time, human labor, raw materials, investments, private property, and plans, into totally useless projects like making weapons to fight aliens, or, as FDR did, paying people to burn their own crops or dig ditches that soon would be refilled thanks to government, debt—and-tax-fueled spending.
The more often fraudulent ideology and statistical legerdemain like Krugman’s are exposed, the better. It’s not just a matter of economic progress, it’s a matter of morality. One might want to question the morality of a man like Krugman, who so often has shown such utter contempt for the truth and for us, the people at whom he directs his nonsense.
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