Economic dunce-in-chief Paul Krugman knows as much about intellectual consistency as he does about the meaning of “transitory” inflation. His proverbial brain aneurysm to that effect was put on full display during the August 5 edition of PBS’s Amanpour & Company, which also airs on CNN.
Krugman went on a sanctimonious rant against President Donald Trump over his suggestion that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was rigging jobs numbers under former Biden-appointed commissioner Erika McEntarfer, of which FEC records indicate was a Democrat donor. “This is Banana Republic stuff. This is -- I wrote about it, I called it Caracas on the Potomac. It's -- this is the kind of thing we only see in authoritarian regimes,” Krugman cried. Trump fired McEntarfer, after a record of her BLS being extremely wrong on the true state of the jobs market.
“This is -- the BLS is the most professional, I mean, as -- agency -- well, I shouldn't dis other agencies, but it's incredibly professional,” pontificated Krugman. Then Krugman went on a tear against Trump for even suggesting the BLS was “cooking the books," and never mind his own record:
There's not a hint. I mean, as Greg says, if you -- you cannot -- to -- the idea that they are surreptitiously on some hidden basis cooking the books, that would be impossible to do without there being lots of buzz about it happening. And of course, it's not. And it -- you know, Trump had no problem with the numbers when they were good. As soon as they get bad, it's a conspiracy.
This ignored the fact that the self-aggrandizing economist did that very thing five years ago.
When jobs numbers were good in 2020, Krugman also suggested a “conspiracy” was going on at the BLS. When the BLS reported a whopping 2.5 million increase in nonfarm payrolls in June 2020 blowing out expectations, Krugman didn’t know what to do with them except try to speculate the “possibility” that the Trump administration had “gotten to the BLS” to fudge the numbers. No, we’re not kidding. “This being the Trump era, you can't completely discount the possibility that they've gotten to the BLS,” Krugman wrote in a June 5, 2020 tweet that got blasted straight to hell by Twitter users at the time.
In effect, Krugman’s self-righteous rant against Trump for questioning the integrity of BLS now is pot-calling-the-kettle-black juiced with steroids.
What’s even more damning is that infamous tweet that later forced Krugman to issue a mea culpa is still live to this day on X, and CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga — who filled in for Christiane Amanpour — didn’t even bother to bring it up.
This being the Trump era, you can't completely discount the possibility that they've gotten to the BLS, but it's much more likely that the models used to produce these numbers — they aren't really raw data — have gone haywire in a time of pandemic 3/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 5, 2020
But Krugman’s hypocrisy didn’t end with the BLS’s integrity. He claimed during his recent PBS segment that revisions of the kind just released showing the BLS grossly mistaken job growth again by hundreds of thousands of jobs are what “typically what happens when the economy is in fact going through some kind of inflection point.”
But that’s not the tune he was singing at the end of President Joe Biden’s economy in November 2024. When jobs gains for October were a pathetic 12,000 and previous monthly numbers were revised down 112,000 lower after the embarrassing 818,000 jobs overestimation for the 12 month period ending March 2024, Krugman didn’t seem to think this represented an inflection point for the Biden economy in a Nov. 1, 2024 column: “So what did we learn? Mostly that you shouldn’t pay much attention to monthly job numbers.”
Actually, we learned “[m]ostly that you shouldn’t pay much attention to” what Krugman really has to say about anything.