How Trump Will Make Life Worse for His Own Voters: Paul Krugman, Economist

- Economist Paul Krugman: How Trump will make life worse for his own voters, Alternet, March 25, 2024. -Ed.

Liberal economist Paul Krugman has aggressively defended President Biden's economic policies in his New York Times column, often emphasizing that the US, under Biden's watch, has enjoyed its lowest unemployment figures in more than half a century. But Krugman has also lamented the fact that many of Trump's voters wrongly believe that he would be better for them on the economy — a subject the economist addressed during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast, March 25.

Krugman told host Greg Sargent that pro-Trump voters have "amnesia" about the economic conditions the U.S. faced in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. "He was given a lethal crisis," Krugman recalled. "He responded with denial, dereliction, fantasy solutions. And probably, thousands for sure — probably hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead because of Trump's bad response. And yet, somehow, that has been erased from a lot of people's memory.

They don't remember how actually horrifying it was to watch the president of the United States sort of refusing to deal realistically with this public health crisis."

Krugman explained some ways he believes a 2nd Trump term would be bad for the 2024 GOP nominee's supporters economically, including the return of "Trump tariffs" that were "incompetent." "I get really annoyed at the way everybody now calls Trump a populist. Because he hasn't actually done anything you would call populist in the normal sense.. He basically outsourced actual policy to ideological hardline Rt-Wing Republicans in Congress. So, what you got from Trump might as well have been a Paul Ryan Administration plus tariffs."

Sargent noted that Trump is "floating cuts to Social Security" and has "threatened to repeal Obamacare," asking Krugman, "Wouldn't these policies sell out Trump's blue-collar white base perhaps as much or more than any other demographic?" Krugman responded, "Oh, sure…. The people who really depend on this stuff, whether it's Social Security — blue-collar workers, that is their retirement plan. They don't have pensions. They don't have significant 401ks.. Medicare is their retirement health care"...
https://www.alternet.org/trump-krugman-economy/

READ MORE: How Trump ends Social Security