Some typical Krugman illogical logic

From the man who once got a nobel prize in economics for being wrong, he now entertains us with his version of the question "have you stopped beating your wife"?

Why Was Trumponomics a Flop?

Obviously Powell couldn’t say in so many words that Trumponomics has been a big flop, but that was the subtext of his remarks. And Trump’s frantic efforts to bully the Fed into bigger cuts are an implicit admission of the same thing.

Let's start with the use of past tense? Where does he think Trumponomics is going? Is the country "suddenly" going to go in a different economic direction because of this particular article?

More to the point, the reason Powell doesn't say that Trumponomics is a big flop, is because it hasn't been a big flop. The lowering of the rates is not so much a dig at the economy, but rather an admission that that the constant raising of the rates by the Feds was too much, too quickly, and may be stifling economic growth (which is still steady). In fact, rather than suggest that this rate decrease is evidence that Trump was somehow wrong about his economic ideas, it's actually an admission that Trump has been right all along with his criticism of the Feds.

Keep in mind, that the Feds have a big stick as it comes to the economy. They literally did everything that they possibly could to help the Obama economy (with rates effectively at zero for most of his second term), and have done "nearly" everything they could to slow down the Trump economy (while not really seeing the inflation that generally triggers a rate increase). This is the first time since Trump has been President that the Feds have offered any sort of help to the economy, which is something they could have "always" done considering inflation has stayed in check.

Krugman goes on with his normal rants about tax cuts not working, and how Trump's tariffs are killing the economy, and how Trump's economic uncertainty has triggered the collapse of the economy and caused all of the bad things that Krugman is seeing.

However, Krugman sort of admits:

Now, none of this has led to economic catastrophe. As Adam Smith once wrote, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Except in times of crisis, presidents matter much less for the economy than most people think, and while Trumponomics has utterly failed to deliver on its promises, it’s not bad enough to do enormous damage.

On the other hand, think of the missed opportunities. Imagine how much better shape we’d be in if the hundreds of billions squandered on tax cuts for corporations had been used to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Imagine what we could have done with policies promoting jobs of the future in things like renewable energy, instead of trade wars that vainly attempt to recreate the manufacturing economy of the past.

So once again, Krugman is living in the fantasy world of economics rather than the real world of economics. In Krugman's fantasy world, Obama's stimulus worked  (even though the real world economy continued to tank) because it would have been much worse if not for the spending of a trillion or so on green businesses that went bankrupt and shovel ready projects that were not really shovel ready. He is actually advocating that we would have been so much better off going back to the trillion dollar stimulus (which didn't work in the real world) rather than the tax cuts (which have worked in the real world).

Now the economy is a flop (even though it's doing rather dandy in the real world) because it could have been so much better. This is Standard Krugman logic. Whenever a Democrat is in the White House, things would have been worse, and whenever a Republican is in the White House, things could have been better. The "actual" economy doesn't really matter much to Krugman. Only his own personal fantasy economy.

Boy it must be really, really frustrating for Krugman that it never pans out in reality.

Let's not forget that on election night Krugman predicted an economic collapse (including a stock market crash that might never recover) because of the election of Donald Trump. But in spite of the feds increasing rates nearly every quarter that Trump has been President, the economy has grown, wages are up, good jobs are being created, and the Market continues to hit all time highs. Krugman was wrong, and there is no manner in which he should be realistically able to argue differently.

But now he uses the lowering of the rates as some sort of proof to economic failure? His argument appears to be that just because the economy is pretty strong doesn't make it actually strong. Not when you compare it to his fantasy world where we would otherwise be using Keynesian economic policy instead of Trumponomics.

So has Trumponomics actually been a flop? Of course not. The only place it's been a flop is in Krugman's fantasy universe. The one where if we just spent the amount of money needed (think green new deal and tens of trillion) on green jobs, and other things that continue to fail, we could get back to that "jobs saved" statistic rather than that stupid "jobs created" one. Oh, and we could also go back to that wonderful 1-2 percent growth that Krugman suggested was the new norm, which oddly is a smaller number than the flop economy that we have seen under Trump... but apparently better (just like jobs saved are better than jobs created).

You can't make this shit up.