New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tripled down on his heavily mocked assertion that the country is experiencing a "Biden boom" on Tuesday.
Krugman’s latest op-ed focused on the backlash he had faced after insisting that the U.S. is not in a recession, despite reports showing two consecutive quarters of negative growth. He continued to deny recession claims and insist the economy experienced positive growth.
"But absence of a recession aside, one question I get asked is what happened to the ‘Biden boom’ I — and many other economists — predicted?" Krugman wrote. "And the answer is, it happened! But Americans aren’t feeling it, and it’s worth asking why."
Krugman originally predicted in November 2020 that the economy would experience a "Biden boom" following the coronavirus pandemic.
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After 18 months, Krugman declared Biden’s presidency a success for "adding" more jobs than Trump did in his first 36 months in office. Although he admitted many jobs "added" during Biden’s presidency could be attributed to jobs recovered after being lost to the pandemic, he claimed, "it’s kind of a moot point, anyway," because presidents often "receive credit or blame for economic developments that have little to do with their policies."
He also suggested that the "partisan environment" could be a factor in why people perceive the economy to be bad despite the "Biden boom."
"So why doesn’t Biden get credit for the Biden boom, which is a real thing? Part of the answer is that people may not know about it. Some polling suggests that the public may not be aware that we’ve been creating jobs at all, let alone at a record pace. And we’re in a partisan environment where politicians — let’s not bothsides this, right-wing politicians — can make obviously false assertions and have their supporters believe them. The other day Trump told a crowd that gas in California costs $8.25 a gallon, and nobody laughed. (It was actually $5.43 at the time.)," Krugman wrote.
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Although he praised the economy, Krugman did admit "inflation has, in fact, been outpacing wages since Biden took office; employment may be way up, but the real wages of those with jobs are down. We can argue about whether this episode is bad enough to justify the extreme negativity of public opinion about Biden and his economy, but it’s certainly a bad thing."
Still, he claimed that rising inflation is a response to the "Biden boom" performing too much as well as situations out of Biden’s hands.
"The big critique of Bidenomics, which has a lot of justification, is that big spending last year produced too much of a Biden boom, which led to a rise in core inflation; now the Fed has no choice but to squeeze the economy with higher interest rates until underlying inflation comes down," Krugman wrote.
He closed, "Anyway, the Biden boom was real. It just got overshadowed by inflation, much of which had nothing to do with U.S. policy."
As recently as Aug. 1, Krugman insisted that the economy experienced a "Biden boom" that led to increased inflation. This was following reports that inflation had increased to a record 9.1% in June.
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As of now, economic reports showed that inflation rates have cooled down to a still high 8.5%.
