Freedom Line Blog

There may be no commentator more exposed and discredited in recent years than The New York Times’s Paul Krugman.

Where to even begin?  My personal favorite might be his call for a massive spending “stimulus” when Obama entered office, which he estimated should be approximately $600 billion, to return economic health to the nation.  “When I put this all together,” he said, “I conclude that the stimulus package should be at least 4% of GDP, or $600 billion.”  Obama ended up getting something much larger, closer to $1 trillion.  Yet when the U.S. proceeded to suffer the worst decade of economic performance in U.S. history and multiple failed “recovery summers,” Krugman just shamelessly published a later piece entitled “How Did We Know the Stimulus Was Too Small?”

Fast forward to election night, when he moped and went on record predicting that markets would never recover from Donald Trump’s victory.  You can’t make this stuff up:

It really does now look like President Donald Trump, and markets are plunging.  When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty.  The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.  Still, I guess people want an answer:  If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

So what happened immediately after Krugman’s solemn prediction?  Well, markets reached another record high on Friday.

Perhaps Krugman simply recognizes the wreckage of Obama’s legacy, and masochistically seeks to outdo him?

Ashton makes great points about how the Trump debate could offer Rick Santorum one last chance to make a splash. He REALLY needs to carefully prepare some explosive sound bites. He actually has done very well in the debates at making overall, sustained points, in understandable fashion. But he hasn’t done so in ways that are memorable or galvanizing. I think sound-bite politics is a hugely unfortunate aspect of today’s campaigns. But it is an essential skill to master.  It’s actually not easy, because it needs to sound substantive enough to NOT sound gimmicky, but it needs to be a bit gimmicky in order to be memorable enough to do real good. It’s even harder when you need to do it against somebody who buries you in words the way Gingrich does.

In short, opportunity knocks, but it’s a heavy door to open…. or something like that.