The White House is predicting 9% unemployment throughout 2012 – and when Obama Care takes effect in 2014 expect it to go even higher.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 2, 2011
It's Tuesday–how much inflation has @BarackObama's spending caused today on the price of food and gas?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2012
Rand Paul’s Weimar-like hyper-inflation hasn’t quite come to pass
—UPDATED msnbc
Did you know ObamaCare will cost nearly twice as much as initially expected – $1.8 TRILLION? Repeal Bomb! http://t.co/Bwg4otqs
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 19, 2012
Paul Krugman was eviscerated for a Rolling Stone cover he wrote in 2014 about the accomplishments of the Obama Administration. It was mostly Liberals who were enraged, feeling the President had betrayed his promise. But the progress in the country in many areas was real, and since then environmentalism and diplomacy and science and civil rights have advanced in a number of ways. Gerrymandering and Citizens United are still among very real problems, but I never let political purity get in the way of important victories.
In Krugman’s most recent column, he states something obvious but very necessary in these times of attention deficits: Many of the candidates running for the GOP nomination promised the President’s policies, from the Affordable Care Act to investing borrowed money in the economy, would lead to financial calamity. They’ve been saying such things from early in his first term. Donald Trump predicted “massive inflation” and Rand Paul went so far as to raise the specter of America as a Weimar Republic. The Republican race may currently revolve around Trump’s Reality TV campaign, but sooner or later and certainly in the general-election, these terrible prognostications will be fodder.
Krugman’s opening:
What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates only named President Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile G.O.P. favorite, came up only four times.
Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.
And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just keeps failing to fail. And that’s a big problem for the G.O.P. — even bigger than Donald Trump.•
Tags: Paul Krugman