Krugman Endorses Trump

Paul Krugman’s endorsement of Donald Trump in the Republican primary is our favorite column of the day. The Nobel laureate prefers the tycoon over Senator Marco Rubio. Mr. Krugman kvells that Mr. Trump “has said the unsayable on multiple issues, from declaring that we were deceived into war to calling for higher taxes on the wealthy.” He reckons that Mr. Trump’s rise “has confirmed something polling data already suggested, namely, that most Republican voters don’t actually subscribe to much of the party’s official orthodoxy.”The result, says Mr. Krugman, is that “when Mr. Rubio genuflects at the altars of supply-side economics and hard money, he isn’t telling ordinary Republicans what they want to hear — by and large the party’s base couldn’t care less. He is, instead, pandering to the party’s elite, consisting mainly of big donors and the network of apparatchiks at think tanks, media organizations, and so on.” This is a choice line of argument from a scribe who, in Mr. Krugman, is himself an apparatchik of a big press combine.Choice, too, at a time when Mr. Trump’s opponents have been garnering a majority of the votes. Mr. Trump may yet triumph. Then again, too, he may yet migrate to the very platforms of low taxes and sound money that Mr. Krugman reckons matter to only the elites. The position of the Sun is that the particulars of fiscal and monetary policy do matter — and to everyone. And that it is the principal burden of leadership to illuminate their relevance and importance.Mr. Krugman makes much of his perception that the Republicans have “spent years inveighing against the Fed’s efforts to stave off economic disaster, warning again and again that runaway inflation is just around the corner — and being wrong all the way.” Let the record show that the Sun has avoided predicting market movements and has confined its own inveighing to the idea that the dollar be defined in the way the Founding Fathers intended when they established our constitutional system.In any event, we will see how the Fed’s — meaning also Mr. Krugman’s — reputation (of which the press will ere be the custodian) emerges once the debasement of the dollar is understood. It is a remarkable fact for all the trillions by which the Fed’s balance sheet has been expanded, for all the quantitative easing, zero interest rate programs, and forward guidance that have emerged from the Fed, the men and women of this country who are (or want to be) working, they remain trapped in what has become known as the Great Recession.What a remarkable fact it is that the very phrase “Great Recession” has come to connote not only the technical recession but also the weak and unsatisfying recovery for which the Fed and Mr. Krugman have been claiming credit. Unemployment is down, but so is the job participation rate. Inflation is low but people are being forced to scrimp because prices are so high. How amazing that only the class to whom Mr. Krugman evinces so much hostility is prospering under the policies that Mr. Krugman and his ilk have championed. Wait until his Mr. Trump gets ahold of that.

Krugman Endorses Trump

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