Tag: Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman: GOP ‘family values’ rhetoric is as ‘intellectually bankrupt’ now as it was in 1992

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“Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, who is seeking the GOP nomination in Ohio’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, was cynically playing the family values card when he railed against the “childless left” during a speech on Friday night, July 23 — and he even mentioned some Democrats by name. Liberal economist Paul Krugman has responded to Vance’s speech in his July 26 column for the New York Times, stressing that Republican “family values” rhetoric is as empty and vacuous in 2021 as it was when the GOP made “family values” the theme of the 1992 Republican National Convention.

Vance was speaking at an event hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Democrats he singled out as examples of the “childless” trend in the U.S. included Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City. And Vance praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — a far-right authoritarian — for encouraging more procreation in his country. Booker and AOC, reporter Martin Pengelly noted in The Guardian, don’t have any children. Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, Doug Emhoff.

Vance’s speech, Krugman writes, brought back memories of the GOP’s “family values” rhetoric of 1992. Continue reading.

Paul Krugman: Republicans are willing to endanger the lives of their own voters in order to ‘own the libs’

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Although the vast majority of Texans still haven’t been vaccinated for COVID-19, Gov. Greg Abbott has lifted coronavirus restrictions in his state — including a mask mandate. Liberal economist Paul Krugman lambasts Abbott for his decision his March 4 column for the New York Times, arguing that Abbott and other far-right Republicans are willing to injure their own red state voters in order to “own the liberals.”

“Not wearing a mask is an act of reckless endangerment, not so much of yourself — although masks appear to provide some protection to the wearer — as of other people,” Krugman explains. “Covering our faces while the pandemic lasts would appear to be simple good citizenship, not to mention an act of basic human decency. Yet Texas and Mississippi have just ended their statewide mask requirements.”

Krugman continues, “President Biden has criticized these moves, accusing the states’ Republican leaders of ‘Neanderthal thinking.’ But he’s probably being unfair — to the Neanderthals. We don’t know much about our extinct hominid relatives, but we have no reason to believe that their political scene, if they had one, was dominated by the mixture of spite and pettiness that now rules American conservatism.” Continue reading.

Paul Krugman pinpoints a key flaw in conservative economic ideology

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When Republicans defend junk health insurance plans that leave Americans bankrupt during an illness or variable-rate energy plans in Texas that result in $16,000 bills during severe weather, they use words like “options” and “choice.” But liberal economist Paul Krugman, this week in his New York Times column, argues that Americans shouldn’t be encouraged to choose options that can leave them in financial ruins.

Krugman comments, “Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, is clearly what my father would have called a piece of work…. He suggested that Texans who found themselves with $17,000 electricity bills after the February freeze had only themselves to blame, because they didn’t ‘read the fine print.’ Funny, isn’t it, how politicians who denounce liberal elitists sneer when ordinary Americans get into trouble? But something else struck me about Patrick’s take on supersize power bills: How did we become a country where families can face ruin unless they carefully study something as mundane, as normally routine, as their electricity contract?”

The Times columnist goes on to lament that unregulated electricity in Texas “isn’t a unique example” of an option that can prove disastrous. Continue reading.

Paul Krugman explains how life is getting ‘rapidly worse’ for millions of Americans as the GOP cheers the stock market

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Although the coronavirus crisis has brought double-digit unemployment to the United States, some affluent Americans are continuing to prosper in the stock market. Liberal economist Paul Krugman addresses that disparity in his New York Times column this week, noting how the wide gap between the haves and have-nots continues during the pandemic.

Krugman points out that earlier this week, the S&P 500 “hit a record high” — and Apple “became the first U.S. company in history to be valued at more than $2 trillion.” He quickly adds, however, that “the economy probably doesn’t feel so great to the millions of workers who still haven’t gotten their jobs back and who have just seen their unemployment benefits slashed.”

“The $600-a-week supplemental benefit enacted in March has expired, and Trump’s purported replacement is basically a sick joke,” Krugman explains. “Even before the aid cutoff, the number of parents reporting that they were having trouble giving their children enough to eat was rising rapidly. That number will surely soar in the next few weeks. And we’re also about to see a huge wave of evictions, both because families are no longer getting the money they need to pay rent and because a temporary ban on evictions, like supplemental unemployment benefits, has just expired.” Continue reading.

Paul Krugman reveals why the far right is living out its ‘nightmare’ — and could become more dangerous

AlterNet logoThe “Justice for George Floyd” protests have been having a major impact all around the United States — even in the Deep South, where symbols of the Confederacy are being removed from public property. Discussing the impact of the protests in his New York Times column, liberal economist Paul Krugman asserts that far-right “reactionaries” are having a terrible month. But Krugman also warns that the more threatened reactionaries feel, the more “dangerous” they can become in the months leading up this year’s presidential election.

President Donald Trump has been highly critical of the removal of Confederate monuments from public places — which, Krugman stresses, speaks volumes about Trump’s mentality and the mentality of his party.

“Why should a guy who grew up in Queens care about Confederate tradition in the first place?” Krugman asks. “The answer is that Trump and most of his party are reactionaries.” Continue reading.

Paul Krugman: A stronger GDP won’t help Americans if they’re dead

AlterNet logoLiberal economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, has been stressing that the better a job the United States does with social distancing policies now, the better off the U.S. economy will be in the long run. In his Thursday column, Krugman warns that a premature reopening could hurt the U.S. both economically and from a health standpoint.

“America is now engaged in a vast, dangerous experiment,” Krugman writes. “Although social distancing has limited the spread of the coronavirus, it is far from contained. Yet despite warnings from epidemiologists, much of the country is moving to open up for business as usual.”

President Donald Trump and his allies, Krugman notes, have been asserting that a speedy reopening is necessary in order to “save the economy.” But Krugman emphasizes that a strong GDP isn’t going to help Americans who die needlessly. Continue reading.

Paul Krugman offers an elegy for the ‘thousands about to die for the Dow’

AlterNet logoIt’s not entirely clear what is motivating Republican politicians across the country to agitate for the premature reopening of businesses, boldly ignoring the all-but-certain increase in human deaths from the COVID-19 virus that will doubtlessly follow. But Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, writing for the The New York Times, tries to distill it into three possible rationales.

The first is that Republicans, sensing an electoral disaster looming for their party in November, are desperately offering up American citizens as human sacrifices in a ritualistic obeisance to their Dow Jones deity, in hopes that Americans flooding back into an infected and potentially deadly work environment will magically “turn around” the economy.

One answer is that thousands of Americans may be about to die for the Dow. We know that Trump is obsessed with the stock market, and his long refusal to take Covid-19 seriously reportedly had a lot to do with his belief that doing otherwise would hurt stock prices. He may now believe that pretending that the crisis is over will boost stocks, and that that’s all that matters.

Paul Krugman explains how the GOP’s disdain for workers will tank the economy

AlterNet logoThere was no shortage of terrible news coming from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, May 8, when the BLS reported that unemployment had reached 14.7% in the United States in April and that the country had lost 20.5 million more jobs last month — that is, in addition to all the jobs lost in March thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. And Friday’s jobs report doesn’t take into account the jobs that have been lost in May so far. Despite all that, Republicans are hardly going out of their way to help all the Americans who are struggling badly — and liberal economist Paul Krugman calls them out for it in his New York Times column.

“COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on workers,” Krugman explains. “The economy has plunged so quickly that official statistics can’t keep up, but the available data suggest that tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, with more job losses to come and full recovery probably years away. But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits.”

Krugman adds that because “most working-age Americans receive health insurance through their employers,” millions of Americans are — during a deadly pandemic —  losing their health insurance when they lose their jobs. Continue reading.

Economist Paul Krugman breaks down why Trump’s coronavirus response has been ‘catastrophically inadequate’

AlterNet logoAfter weeks of downplaying the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and calling it a “hoax,” President Donald Trump has finally changed his tone — declaring coronavirus to be a national emergency and joining Democrats in calling for aggressive social distancing. But liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman — who was warning about the dangers of coronavirus when Trump still considered it a “hoax” — is not impressed. Trump’s overall response to the pandemic, Krugman asserts in his column, has been “catastrophically adequate” from both a health standpoint and an economic standpoint. And as Krugman sees it, the real leaders in the United States this week have been House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

“At every stage,” Krugman writes, “Donald Trump minimized the threat and blocked helpful action because he wanted to look good for the next news cycle or two, ignoring and intimidating anyone who tried to give him good advice.”

But even before the Covid-19 strain of coronavirus emerged, Krugman adds, Trump did things that have made it harder for the U.S. to cope with a pandemic — most notably, Trump “disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team in 2018.” And Trump, according to Krugman, has “staffed his administration with obsequious toadies who never tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear.” Continue reading.

‘He was lying’: Nobel laureate Paul Krugman breaks down Trump’s anti-working class agenda

AlterNet logoWhen President Donald Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, some Democrats hoped that he would at least have a Nixonian streak on economics: President Richard Nixon, as right-wing as he was, favored universal health care and supported elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. But Trump, for all his pseudo-populist rhetoric, has gone out of his way to attack the United States’ social safety net — and liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, emphasizes that Trump hasn’t delivered on his economic promises of 2016.

“One thing many people forget about the 2016 election is that as a candidate, Donald Trump promised to be a different kind of Republican,” Krugman recalls. “Unlike the mainstream of his party, he declared, he would raise taxes on the rich and wouldn’t cut programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that ordinary Americans rely on. At the same time, he would invest large sums in rebuilding America’s infrastructure. He was lying.”

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Krugman notes, “was absolutely standard modern Republicanism: huge tax cuts for corporations, plus tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy” — and Trump “came very close to passing a health care ‘reform’ that would have imposed savage cuts on Medicaid, eliminated protections for those with pre-existing conditions and taken away health insurance from more than 30 million Americans.” Continue reading.