Economics

This one is a bit dated, as I just stumbled upon it – but it’s still amusing. 

Back in 2020, the economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman penned a New York Times column in which he seemingly revealed that he doesn’t remember his own convictions.

“When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge… he’ll be the first modern US president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous” Krugman wrote.

There are countless examples one could point to as a rebuttal. The most obvious would be Hillary Clinton, who had called Trump an “illegitimate president” as recently as the past September (and it was a tune she’d been singing since immediately after the 2020 election). Former Clinton campaign adviser (and now Biden OMB pick) Neera Tanden took to twitter to spread conspiracies about Russian hacking in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

A week before Trump was sworn into office, the late John Lewis announced his boycott of the inauguration, adding “I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate president.” Meanwhile, Rep. Jerry Nadler told CNN that while Trump was “legally elected,” non-existent Russian interference made his election “illegitimate.”

And there are plenty of other notable Democrats I could quote, but perhaps the most notable is Paul Krugman himself, who penned an article on December 12th of 2016 titled “The Tainted Election.” 

In it he Krugman: “So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement… nothing that happened on Election Day or is happening now is normal. Democratic norms have been and continue to be violated, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this reality is, in effect, complicit in the degradation of our republic. This president will have a lot of legal authority, which must be respected. But beyond that, nothing: he doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.“

While Paul Krugman isn’t good at debunking much of anything, he was at least able to debunk Paul Krugman.

Investor and sometime reality TV Star Kevin O’Leary has had it with companies drifting ever-leftward. “Mr. Wonderful,” famous for his appearances on the reality show Shark Tank, spoke to NBC News about the farm-supply chain Tractor Supply’s recent decision to axe all spending on “woke” causes.

The company recently said it would stop cooperating with LGBTQ pressure group Human Rights Campaign, it’s getting rid of all positions having to do with Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), and it won’t be spending on any social issues outside of its mission to serve rural Americans.

During an appearance on NBC, O’Leary said Tractor Supply’s recent move was a case study he’s going to add to his teaching practice at Harvard business school. Anheuser-Busch, O’Leary noted, is still “losing market share” over its disastrous partnership with a crossdressing man for a publicity campaign.

He asks students one question: “Who do you serve when you start a business?” O’Leary says the order of priority for any business should be: 1. customers 2. employees 3. investors.  Why would a business focused on rural farm supplies be catering to an urban, leftist agenda?

“I think this company is looking at it saying, are we really responsible for climate change? A social agenda? Gender identity? Are these the things that we should actually be investing in or should we take care of our customers?,” he asked.

It seems like a simple, obvious question, but it also seems like few American corporations have asked it of themselves. According to business researchers at Harvard, American companies spend about $8 billion annually on DEI initiatives that likely have nothing at all to do with their bottom line.

O’Leary had a good time sending up the lecturing tone of the woke hucksters when he jokingly asked if the “hog community” on a farm really cares about the social justice spending done by the farm feed store. You can watch the whole segment below.

“The pendulum is swinging back to normalcy,” O’Leary said. “American is saying enough already, this stuff is too crazy, it doesn’t work, it’s not the core of what a business is about.”

It’s a biased sample, of course, but those who read O’Leary’s Twitter/X feed seem to agree.

Some wish O’Leary had gone even farther.

Does a company’s spending on political or social issues influence your decision about whether to patronize them? Tell us in the comments.

Conservatives love to use the phrase, “Go woke, go broke,” but too often it’s been more of a wish than a reality.

That may be changing.

For years—since at least 2015—corporations have eagerly adopted every leftist demand for “cultural change.” Environmental and Social Governance (ESG)? Check. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)? Check. Let men who claim to be women use the ladies’ room at the office? Check.

Despite protest from customers, companies have barreled ahead aiming at a spot to the left of Karl Marx. Any patron who didn’t like it was either ignored, or blamed for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the sexualization of children. Disney is famous, for example, for blaming the poor box office receipts for its offerings on “sexist” and bigoted audience members.

But in 2024, “go woke, go broke” is starting get closer to reality. Anheuser-Busch destroyed the Bud Light brand overnight when a former executive decided to team up with a crossdressing gay man to “celebrate” “diversity.” The company lost $27 billion in market value.

It looks like rural farm-supply chain Tractor Supply knows which way the wind is blowing and wants to stay out of the storm. Filmmaker Robbie Starbuck has been after the company for weeks for its spending on woke causes such as anything labeled “LGBTQ+”.

Tractor Supply’s customers were none too pleased to know their dollars were going to organizations that wanted to teach schoolchildren about “alternative” sexualities.

In a surprisingly frank turn-around, Tractor Supply just announced it’s dropping Woke. All of it. You can read the whole statement here.

The highlights? Tractor Supply won’t be cooperating with the LGBTQ pressure group Human Rights Campaign any longer, they won’t be sponsoring any pride festivals, and they’re not going to be spending on any more “non-business activities” unless those focus on farming, agriculture, animals, and veterans’ issues.

Reaction on social media has been overwhelmingly positive. Antiwoke muckraking account LibsofTikTok showed right up:

People appreciate the honest and candid approach the company took.

They’ve won back some customers who walked away, too.

But there’s always one or two die-hard activists making a sour face.

What do you think of Tractor Supply’s decision? Tell us in the comments.

In an amusing column following Joe Biden’s spectacular loss to Donald Trump in the first presidential debate, the New York Times’ chief hack Paul Krugman called Biden the best president of his adult life…. before asking him to step aside.

Even in the face of a performance like what we saw last night, Krugman’s hyperpartisanship prevents him from truly acknowledging that there’s anything wrong with Biden. When posting his post-debate article to twitter this morning, he captioned it “I really hated writing this.”

Oh, the horrors.

Always a staunch enemy of the GOP, Paul Krugman’s partisanship predates the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” we saw sweep the media. He was seemingly never vaccinated against TDS, Romney Derangement Syndrome, McCain Derangement Syndrome, Bush Derangement Syndrome, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

If Trump does win in November, which is now a statistical favorite, Krugman’s TDS may finally reach stage four.

During his presidency, Trump had personally blasted Krugman for losing all credibility with his “false and highly inaccurate writings,” and there’s no hyperbole there.

On the theme of Krugman being betrayed by his own partisan hackery, I thought it would be fun to compile some of his worst predictions over the years.

Here are just a few.

The Stock Market is Doomed Under Trump!

When it became clear that Donald Trump would win the presidential election late into the night on November 8th, 2016, the stock futures market initially panicked, with the Dow Jones shedding over 800 points.

Before the markets even had the chance to open the following day, Krugman took to his New York Times column to predict they would never recover. “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? … If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

The Dow closed up 250 points the next morning – and skyrocketed thereafter.

Admittedly I’m not sure how to calculate the margin of error on the difference between “never” and “the next day.”

The Trump stock market surge continued almost entirely uninterrupted during his presidency, with the only exception being at the beginning of 2020 due to a global pandemic. But despite even that, major indexes still closed out higher in 2020.

Krugman in 2017 – There Will Be No Return to 3% Growth

Appearing on the network Bloomberg in March 2017, Krugman expressed doubt that we’d be seeing a return to 3% economic growth under the Trump administration.

He reiterated the same point later in the year on Twitter, arguing that at it would be difficult to achieve 3% growth due to baby boomers leaving the workforce.

But >3% growth much harder now that baby boomers leaving prime working age instead of entering it pic.twitter.com/dIn4P5XfYH

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 29, 2017

No surprise here: he was dead wrong.

Growth was 3.1% from the fourth quarter of 2017 in the fourth quarter of 2018. Even more impressive, the economy was only projected to grow 2% according to the baseline under Obama.

A Recession is Coming!

In February of 2019 Krugman predicted that a recession is coming “this year or next.”

It’s hard to give Krugman any credit for his predictive ability, because he been predicted a Trump recession every single year of his presidency.

Krugman had also dialed back the severity of his prediction. On election night Krugman predicted that Trump would throw the entire planet’s economy into a recession. He admitted in his February prediction “By the way, my track record for this is bad—as is everybody’s. No one is good at calling these turning points.”

Anyone can be a prophet when they make the same prediction every year, and Krugman was “technically” right in that there was a recession in 2020, though no one can put the blame for the Chinese virus that caused it on Trump (though they will try). Trump then oversaw the fastest recovery from a recession of that severity in U.S. history – which Krugman did not predict.

Nothing New

It’s not just under the Trump-era that the world’s most arrogant economist has butchered his predictions.

In 1998, Krugman dismissed the rise of the internet’s popularity and its eventual economic effects: “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Only four years later Krugman came up with a plan to save the economy from the technology bubble which had just went bust – create another economic bubble! “To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” And with that came the worst financial crisis since the great depression.

And that’s not all! In 2010 he predicted that we’d begin experiencing deflation – when in reality we experienced relatively low inflation. In 2008 he predicted that Europe would outperform America economically – and then the financial crisis hit, and Europe was hit far harder than the U.S. (and took much longer to recover from it). On eleven occasions between April 2010-July 2012 Krugman predicted that the Euro would collapse – which obviously never happened.

There’s a running joke in the finance community that you can make yourself a killing my simply doing the opposite of whatever Jim Cramer is advising. Perhaps the same can be said for Krugman, too!