Revised labor market data reveals errors in Krugman's praise for Biden's labor market

New York Times Economics columnist Paul Krugman has spilled a lot of ink over the past year praising President Joe Biden's booming job market, and now it's backfiring.

With the recent bad news that the government vastly overestimated job growth by a whopping 818,000 jobs, busybody Krugman has run out of steam. That 818,000 figure represents about 30 percent of job growth for the 12-month period ending in March 2024 and represents the largest revision in 15 years. Yet during that 12-month period, Krugman was caught up in his own self-medicated political frenzy, claiming in an April 2023 opinion piece that Biden would supposedly “preside over the best job market America has seen in a generation—and that's since the boom of the late Clinton years.” But this isn't the first time he's put himself in the firing line in this way. Just a few months later, in July 2023, Krugman again praised Biden for creating “arguably the best job market in a generation.”

Heritage Public Finance economist EJ Antoni noted in an August 21 statement on the massive job overhaul: “[t]the labor market is nowhere near as strong as it is portrayed.” Antoni even warned: “Today's negative benchmark is the second largest in history after 2009, when the labor market bottomed out in the Great Recession.” So Krugman's ramblings are aging like a fine, smelly cheese.

Krugman always seems to find a way to make himself look even more ridiculous than he already does. In 2022, MRC Business analyzed how Krugman's three rules for 2021 Bidenomics self-destructed a year later, as the nation grappled with an insane inflation crisis caused by Biden and the Federal Reserve's moronic spending policies. The bad humor in each of Krugman's so-called “rules” he drafted in January 2021 speaks for itself:

• “Rule No. 1: Do not doubt the government’s willingness to help.”
• “Rule #2: Don’t worry too much about debt.”
• “Rule #3: Don’t worry about inflation.”

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. The Rules are the summary of what Krugman thought was good economic policy before the chaos that has befallen Americans in recent years. Moreover, Krugman's list of major failures coincides precisely with his ridiculous habit of looking down his nose and responding condescendingly to the struggling American plebeian who sees the Biden economy as the disaster that it is. It's like watching a bad sitcom stuck in a marathon. Krugman's obsession with the Biden labor market, which was ultimately blown to pieces, is just the latest episode.

As National review As political correspondent Jim Geraghty pointed out, the recent, stunning revision of the labor market situation shows that one of the “dominant narratives in economic reporting” that quacks like Krugman helped to spread over the past year – “'the economy is doing great, jobs are being created at a massive rate, so why are Americans so pessimistic about the economy?' – is at least flawed.”

Readers should think of Krugman's words like inflation: too many terrible opinions chasing too few realities.

Conservatives under fire. Contact the New York Times at 1 (800) 698-4637 and to demand that the government distance itself from Krugman's terrible economic views.