Presumptive Republican candidateDonald Trump kicked up a storm last week with his rumored policy proposal of doing away with income taxes and supplanting them with additional tariffs. Noted economist Paul Krugman weighed in with his thoughts on the former president’s tenure and his policies in a new podcast that aired on Monday.
What Happened: Krugman in the latest Deep State Radio podcast episode said, Trump is suggesting policy proposals that are impractical and calamitous, yet they have been disregarded. The reason behind this is the understanding that tariffs cannot substitute income taxes. Krugman added that if the former president were proposing something feasible, there would likely be widespread condemnation of the idea.
“Trump is floating policy proposals that are completely unworkable and disastrous. And in some peculiar way, people kind of discount it”
“The fact that so it’s terrible to the point of incomprehensibility means that somehow he’s let off the hook,” he added.
Most people didn’t get a full sense of just how bad and how unsuited Trump was for the job of the president during his tenure because he didn’t get much done, except for a “bad” standard Republican tax cut and a few other things, the economist said. Then in 2020 when the country was confronted with a genuine national crisis that required intelligent decisions and leadership, all of that was revealed, he added, referring to what is widely perceived to be mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis.
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Trump-stalgia: Krugman also clarified regarding Trump-stalgia problem, which is the tendency to forget what happened under Trump. In 2020, America was in a pretty good place, which has nothing to do with Trump, the economist said, adding that “at least he didn’t manage to screw it up.”
The economy finally emerged from the financial crisis in 2008, partly because Republicans stopped imposing destructive fiscal austerity, and crime had fallen a lot over the previous 20 years, he said. The usual vast inequalities were still there but the economy was in pretty good shape, he added.
“The economy right now looks, if anything, a little bit better than it did in 2019,” Krugman said. Crime wave has subsided but people forget there was a burst of crime that happened under Trump and has now gone away, he added.
The economist also shrugged off the inflation concerns, stating that it was a global thing that occurred in the aftermath of the pandemic.
“But people have managed to somehow think of the Trump era as being the way the world was in December 2019 and somehow or other have in many ways come to believe that all of the bad stuff that happened along the way was somehow Biden’s fault even if it happened when Trump was still in the white house,” he said.
Krugman also noted that swing state polls show that people think the economy was terrible but felt okay about how they were personally doing and about how the state’s economy was doing.
“People have this idea that really bad stuff is happening but to somebody out there somebody,” he said.
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