Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

For the past month, Democrats have talked the Trump/GOP economy down, saying that it’s only helping the richest 1%. That’s been debunked thoroughly but now we have proof thanks to Brian Bakst’s article on Minnesota’s oversized surplus.

In his article, Mr. Bakst reports “Minnesota tax collections soared well past expectations for April, according to a tally released Friday. The Department of Minnesota Management and Budget reported revenue that was $489 million above what had been projected to come in. The excess is 17 percent above expectations for the month. April is when most income tax payments are made, so this update is more pivotal than others.”

This is vitally important for several reasons. First, it’s proof that President Trump’s policies are working. Exceeding expectations by 17% in the biggest collection month of the year is a big deal. Next, it’s a death blow to Gov. Walz’s and the DFL’s tax increases. With the economy growing in spite of Gov. Dayton’s and the DFL’s policies, it’s safe to say that we don’t need another $12,000,000,000 in tax increases.

We’re already running a $1,000,000,000+ surplus. Minnesota’s Rainy Day Fund has $2,500,000,000 in it. With the economy roaring, why should Minnesota plan on a downturn or recession? That’s as stupid as moving to Hawaii and bringing your winter parka from Minnesota.

The question for Gov. Walz and the DFL now is whether they want to spend Minnesota into oblivion or whether they’re willing to act like adults for a change. At this point, I’m not sure whether the DFL’s special interests will win out or whether the people of Minnesota will win out.

What I’m certain of, though, is that the GOP is consistently aligning with the people of Minnesota. That’s a stark contrast with Gov. Walz and the DFL.

We’re finally in the last part of the Legislature’s regular session. Apparently, we’re steaming towards the biennial stalemate otherwise known as the budget special session. Unlike other years, this isn’t just about budget numbers. This time, it’s about the direction of the state of Minnesota, both economically and politically. It’s about whether Minnesotans side with the DFL and financial unsustainability or with the MNGOP and financial stability.

The DFL, led by Gov. Walz, has picked historic tax increases (again) and unsustainable spending. If Walz and the DFL get their way, the state will spend $83,000,000,000 for all revenues spending this biennium, with $51,000,000,000 in general revenue spending. Special thanks go to Harold Hamilton and the Minnesota Watchdog for highlighting the fact that “As recently as 2001, the state spent $37 billion in that biennium. This biennium will see all funds spending of $83 billion.”

That’s far beyond ridiculous. That’s irresponsible in the extreme on the part of the DFL. Mr. Hamilton highlights this important fact:

Capital is Mobile – And it Will Flee.
When taxes are too high, taxpayers will flee to lower taxed jurisdictions. This is especially true for higher net worth taxpayers, who generally have the resources and sophistication to engage in careful tax planning. High tax states are falling into a fiscal death spiral as they raise taxes to cover more and more spending while at the same time fewer and fewer taxpayers remain to shoulder the burden.

Isn’t it interesting that Gov. Walz’s Department of Revenue did their tax incident report, which showed that the lowest income people will get hit hardest by Gov. Walz’s and the DFL’s $12,000,000,000 tax increase over the next 4 years? That’s just starting the bad news. Hamilton continues:

Every reputable organization that analyzes tax burdens ranks Minnesota among the least tax-friendly states in the nation. With respect to overall tax burden, Minnesota is in the top 5 of every reputable ranking, including being the dubious distinction of #1 overall in Kiplinger’s rankings.

No matter the metric, Minnesota punishes its taxpayers. Kiplinger’s also ranked Minnesota as the least friendly state in the nation for retiree income. For example, it’s one of the few states in the nation to tax Social Security income. Add to that high estate taxes, and retirees have little reason to live here, other than the magnificent weather. The North Star state also has a nasty reputation for punitive taxes on the working poor through high regressive taxes.

Here’s the latest on negotiations:

Just before 7 p.m., the Democrats and Republicans met with the Governor. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half. Two major budget sticking points concern Gov. Walz’s proposed 20-cent gas tax and the already in place 2% medical provider tax, which sets aside money for low-income Minnesotans for health care.

Gov. Walz said they made a budget offer last Wednesday, even cutting $400 million in spending and revenue over the next two years, but he says Republicans won’t meet them in the middle. The Governor is confident a compromise will happen soon, but he says his patience is being tested.

“It doesn’t matter if there’s a big story in southern Minnesota telling us that our transportation’s at a tipping point and every single county commissioner and city manager and civil engineer was interviewed for it and said, ‘Yeah, we got to do something or this can be catastrophic,’ and yet we’re still hearing no,” Gov. Walz said. “So yeah, my frustration level is growing.”

First, there’s virtually no support for the gas tax increase. I mean, less than 20% of Minnesotans support a gas tax increase. Further, we learned this week that revenue collection for April was almost $500,000,000 over expectations, meaning we’d have a surplus for this biennium of over $1,500,000,000. If you add into that the fact that there’s over $2,500,000,000 in Minnesota’s Rainy Day Fund, there’s really no reason for any tax increases.

It’s time for Gov. Walz and the DFL to fold their tent and return to Realityville. God only knows where they’re at right now. I’m betting the DFL is inhabiting another solar system.

When it comes to demagoguery, Democrats are utterly shameless. They don’t tell the truth much, either. If you’re looking for integrity, you won’t find much of that in the Democrat Party. Alfredo Ortiz’s article lays out the details nicely.

Ortiz wrote “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that ‘the evidence shows that most of the economic gains continue to benefit those already well-off.’ House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer claimed, ‘wages aren’t growing fast enough to allow millions of workers to keep pace and feel that real economic security is within reach.’ And Sen. Cory Booker broadly asserted that ‘Americans are struggling.'”

Then he wrote “Start with unemployment rates, which are at or near record lows for Hispanic, black, female, and young workers. The unemployment rate for Americans without a high-school education, supposedly a group that’s been shafted in today’s economy, is hovering near a record low. The rate for those with disabilities has fallen by more than 20 percent over the last year to a mere 6.3 percent — the lowest level on record.”

These Democrats pretend that the economy isn’t helping anyone outside the top 1% but these Democrats know that they’re lying. Democrats know that they don’t stand a chance in 2020 if people think that they’re doing well. That’s what’s leading to the Democrats talking like we’re living in ‘soup line America’, a mythical place where nobody’s getting a fair shake and where evil corporations get all the benefits of the tax cuts.

Then look at wages. While average wages have been growing at about 3.2 percent for several months now, they’ve been increasing even faster for middle-class production and nonsupervisory workers. Last year, wage growth was 6.5 percent for the 10th percentile of workers with the lowest incomes — about double the overall average. Contrast this wage growth to the paltry 2 percent average under President Obama.

It’s at points like this that I like to highlight the fact that consumer is near an all-time high. The reason I like highlighting that is because people aren’t confident if they’re worried that they’re about to get laid off or if they think that they won’t get a raise anytime soon. In other words, people are feeling the effects of the tax cuts and they aren’t worried about getting laid off anytime soon.

This is what President Trump is fighting against:

Let’s be honest. This economy is helping lots of people in every sector of the economy. Blue collar workers are experiencing the fastest wage gains of anyone. More small businesses are getting created. Income earned outside the US is flooding back in.

Finally, Democrats are establishing an impossible benchmark. They’re finding a person here or there that isn’t doing well. Since when did any economy literally help everyone? Further, I’d ask how President Obama’s handling of the economy compare with President Trump’s. Job growth was ok but economic growth and wage growth were pathetic.

It’s insulting to hear DFL legislators and Democrat Gov. Tim Walz complain that Republicans hadn’t moved from their position of being unwilling to raise Minnesota’s taxpayers burden by $12,000,000,000 over the next 4 years. According to this AP article, the DFL expected GOP lawmakers to accept that $12,000,000,000 tax increase in exchange for the DFL cutting $332,000,000 out of the DFL’s $50,000,000,000 budget.

That isn’t a compromise. That’s a total capitulation if it happened. Thankfully, it won’t happen. That’s because the GOP majority in the Senate won’t budge on these (or any other) tax increases.

Minnesota’s tax and regulatory system has already made it one of the least competitive states in the US. According to Walz’s own Department of Revenue report, the Walz-DFL monster tax increases promise to hit lower income taxpayers the hardest:

The tax plan proposed by Gov. Tim Walz would hit lower income Minnesotans harder than wealthier earners. That’s the outcome of analysis by the Democratic governor’s own Department of Revenue, which carried out a tax incidence analysis of Walz’s plan, which includes, among other things, a reduction in state income taxes but increases in business, estate, gas and vehicle sales tax, among other changes.

According to the revenue department, the overall tax burden on Minnesotans would increase from 11.63 percent currently to 12.39 percent under Walz’s plan, an increase of 0.76 percent. However it’s the lowest earners who would see a bigger increase in their taxes.

The so-called Party of the Little Guy wants to soak the little guy? That fits the DFL’s identity since the DFL seems to think that President Trump’s broad-based recovery is only being felt by millionaires and billionaires, not the blue collar workers that’ve experienced a 4.5% growth in wages compared with the 1% seeing a 3% increase in wages:

The governor said in an interview on Minnesota Public Radio that his budget was based on what the state needs to spend to maintain quality education and other programs at a time when the state’s population is growing, and that he’d like to see some reciprocity from Republicans.

That’s BS! Minnesota doesn’t need to become less competitive taxwise. Republicans’ campaign slogan should be ‘Make Minnesota competitive again.’ There isn’t a polite way to put this so I’ll just say it. Tim Walz and Melissa Hortman are economic illiterates. Walz was a nobody in Washington, DC. Hortman’s list of accomplishments is shorter than Barack Obama’s.

If the DFL keeps insisting on their massive tax increases, Hortman will be a 1-term speaker and Republicans will gain seats in the Senate, too. These tax increases are, to put it politely, counterproductive. The DFL should be sued for economic malpractice.

Earlier this week, I wrote this post to highlight Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s pandering to the Democrats’ base. In her interview with Jake Tapper, she said “I give our workers and our businesses the credit.’ Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar says the American workforce and ‘policies in place, starting with President Obama’ get the credit for historically strong economic numbers.”

Way back in 2009, the Democrat supermajorities in the House and Senate passed a $850,000,000,000 stimulus bill. President Obama signed that bill. Part of that bill was a program named Cash For Clunkers. A year after signing the stimulus bill, the money was having virtually no positive effect on the economy. There were more headaches than positives. I wrote about one of the headaches in this post.
When I first watched this interview, I laughed my ass off:

During an interview with Brian Sullivan, Grant Bosse had some light-hearted fun at President Obama’s expense:

SULLIVAN: Our next guest has just announced his run for Congress from the phantom Double-Zero district of New Hampshire, one of those mentioned in the stimulus plan that don’t actually exist. Grant Bosse says that if it’s good enough to be cited as creating jobs, it ought to have a congressman.
Grant Bosse, Brian Sullivan in for Neil today. Forgive the tongue in cheek.
BOSSE: Oh, of course.
SULLIVAN: The Fighting Double-Zero, isn’t that what you’re calling it up there?
BOSSE: The Fighting Double-Zero. It’s about time we had representation in Congress. Just because we don’t exist doesn’t mean we shouldn’t count. We’re just as serious, we’re just as real as the jobs that were created under the stimulus plan.
SULLIVAN: What is your phantom platform?
BOSSE: Well, to keep the jobs here that the stimulus bill created.
SULLIVAN: Real jobs, though, right? Double-Zero would be happy to push them out to a real New Hampshire district, I assume?
BOSSE: We supposedly found out this week, through the Franklin Center’s report on 440 fake congressional districts nationwide, that New Hampshire’s Double-Zero District got about 2,800 jobs from the stimulus plan, which was quite a shock to the people who don’t live there because it doesn’t exist. And then when they changed the website, they took those 2,800 jobs away, so I’m gonna fight to bring them back and I think we need the type of fake jobs that, um…
SULLIVAN: If I was a fake member of that fake district, I’d be really upset because I was being discounted as being fake.
BOSSE: And that’s why I’m asking you to pretend to vote for me.
SULLIVAN: You know, you’ve got my pretend vote. Now the problem is that it’s in real reports. So it’s not a fake report. That’s the problem. It’s a fake district with fake jobs but it’s a real report.
BOSSE: Yeah, we spent $84,000,000 as part of this stimulus plan for the recovery.gov website and what we got is a very nice website with a great interactive map and the data on it is complete garbage. And in fact, the people that run that website now admit that they can’t tell how many jobs the stimulus bill created because the data, they never bothered to check if the data was any good or not.
SULLIVAN: Listen, if I get up to the Phantom Fighting Double-Zero District, we’ll go out for a fake burger, a fake beer and a real conversation.
BOSSE: No, the beer will be real.
SULLIVAN: That’s the best part. Grant Bosse, thank you very much and good luck with your campaign.
BOSSE: We’ll need it.

The Obama administration wants to take credit for Trump’s booming economy but they couldn’t even get a simple website running to track the jobs created by their stimulus bill. We’re supposed to believe that they knew how to create jobs even though their stimulus bill did virtually nothing over a 3-year period. There’s no reason to give them credit for anything other than being the most economically inept administration this side of the Great Depression. It’s foolish to trust Sen. Klobuchar or any other Democrat’s opinions on the economy. They voted against eliminating President Obama’s regulations aimed at killing the fossil fuel industry. Not a single Democrat in either the House or Senate voted for the Trump/GOP tax cuts that’ve fired up this economy.

I’ll give credit where credit is due. It’s pretty apparent that Democrats deserve very little credit for this roaring economy.

It’s disappointing, though not surprising, that Sen. Klobuchar is pandering to the max to win the Democrat nomination for president. She’s pandering now by saying that President Obama, not President Trump, deserves the credit for Trump’s booming economy.

She said “‘I give our workers and our businesses the credit.’ Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar says the American workforce and ‘policies in place, starting with President Obama’ get the credit for historically strong economic numbers.”

Despite her statements to the contrary, Sen. Klobuchar isn’t that stupid. The policies put in place by President Obama and Sen. Klobuchar have been dispatched with one exception, aka the ACA. By using the Congressional Review Act, President Trump and the GOP majorities in the House and Senate got rid of the industry-killing regulations imposed by President Obama’s administration.

Further, the corporate tax cuts and provisions allowing for repatriation of profits from overseas are leading to previously unforeseen prosperity. How can President Obama insist on taking credit for the rocketship known as the US economy after he told the nation that the GDP numbers that then-candidate Trump predicted were a figment of President Trump’s imagination? Remember this, Sen. Klobuchar?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: He says he’s gonna negotiate a better deal. Well, how’s he gonna do that? How, exactly, are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have and, usually, the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”

Just because President Obama was too inept to negotiate great trade deals doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to negotiate great trade deals. It’s just proof that President Obama wasn’t capable of negotiating great trade deals.

Changing economic incentives changes the economy’s growth trajectory. You don’t need a PH.D. to figure that out. Getting rid of counterproductive regulations lift the weight off major industries’ shoulders. Think fossil fuels, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.

The policies that Sen. Klobuchar voted for and that President Obama put in place were thrown onto the scrap heap of history’s discredited policies. Virtually all of the Obama administration’s economic legacy was trashed within the first year of President Trump’s administration. I’d love hearing Sen. Klobuchar, or any other Democrat presidential candidate, explain how policies that aren’t in place anymore are triggering this economic growth.

When incentives change from stifling economic growth to enticing economic growth, isn’t it human nature for profit-makers, aka entrepreneurs, to make profits again?

Ms. Klobuchar also said that many Americans are still struggling financially, thanks to high student loan debt and health-care costs. “That being said, a lot of people aren’t sharing in this prosperity, because of the cost, the cost of college, the cost of health care,” Ms. Klobuchar said. “The fact that the president had promised he would bring down the prices of their prescription drugs, and that just hasn’t happened.”

Larry Kudlow has heard enough of the Democrats’ criticism and he’s speaking out about it:

“I’m just gonna use the damn facts,” he told Fox News’ Leland Vittert. “On the wage front, [average hourly earnings are] rising 3.2 percent overall. The bottom [poorest] quarter [of workers], 4.4 percent increase, the top quarter, 3.5 percent [increase].”

“First of all, both are good and a rising tide is lifting all boats,” Kudlow added. “But the point I’m making is, it’s the blue collar people that have the fastest job expansion and it’s the blue collar people that have the best wage growth.”

“Wow! Low unemployment, high jobs, high wages, big consumer confidence, major productivity and no inflation,” said an enthusiastic Kudlow while gesturing toward the camera. “It’s totally awesome. We’re killing it on the economy.”

Obama and Klobuchar can lie all they want about people not experiencing the gains triggered by President Trump’s policies but the reality is that people are experiencing the growth. Why else would small business and consumer confidence be through the roof? If people aren’t feeling good about their economic situation, they aren’t confident.

For 2+ years, Democrats have criticized President Trump’s economy. The first shit-for-brains Democrat to criticize President Trump’s economy was Paul Krugman. In fact, he didn’t wait for Trump’s inauguration. On Election Night, Krugman said “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never. Under any circumstances, putting an irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people in charge of the nation with the world’s most important economy would be very bad news. What makes it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is still in, eight years after the great financial crisis.”

Krugman later said “Now comes the mother of all adverse effects, and what it brings with it is a regime that will be ignorant of economic policy and hostile to any effort to make it work. Effective fiscal support for the Fed? Not a chance. In fact, you can bet that the Fed will lose its independence, and be bullied by cranks.”

After that statement, it’s amazing that anyone would listen to him. Unfortunately, they did:

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman warns a global recession could come this year from CNBC.
Tom Rogan’s article asks the right question:

What planet are the Democrats on?

That’s a perfect question, although at times I wonder if they’re part of the same solar system. For the past 2-3 months, Democrats have peddled the storyline that people aren’t feeling the good economy, that the GDP and the great job creation numbers and the rising wage numbers are hiding the misery that most people are feeling.

What the hell are Democrats talking about? Would consumer confidence be soaring if people didn’t notice the strong economy? Should people think that nobody’s noticing their rising wages and the extra wages in each paycheck?

Of course, they’re noticing these things. They’d have to be as dumb as a Democrat to not notice. My advice to LFR readers is simple. Ignore the Democrats’ spin. Follow President Reagan’s advice:

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

The economy is going gangbusters. Now, though, isn’t the time to be lethargic. It’s time to mobilize. It’s time to defeat the socialists, aka Democrats. Let’s not give them the chance to ruin this prosperity cycle.

For the past 6 months, Democrats have consistently tried talking down the economy, suggesting that we were heading for a slowdown, if not a full recession. The economy just won’t cooperate with the Democrats. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, aka the BLS, announced that the US economy created 263,000 jobs in April. Further, “Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 263,000 in April, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate fell to 3.6% last month, the lowest level since December 1969. Average hourly wages for private-sector workers grew 3.2% from a year earlier, matching the prior month’s increase.”

Welcome to Speaker Pelosi’s ‘Soup line America’. This morning, she released this statement. In the statement, she said “The April jobs report numbers show some promising news, yet these gains hide the true weight of the economic uncertainty felt by millions of hard-working Americans. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that most of the economic gains continue to benefit those already well-off. We must do more to ensure that the economy is benefiting every family in every community, and that all Americans have the opportunity to move ahead in our economy.”

First, what the hell is she babbling about? Is she intentionally misleading the American people? Compare Pelosi’s negativity with Larry Kudlow’s optimism:

Let’s be clear about something. The strongest job growth, according to Mr. Kudlow, is “has come from the blue collar sector.” Democrats have been attempting to paint a gloomy picture on the economy. That tactic is failing. You things are good when President Trump is getting help from this NYTimes article:

Which workers are benefiting?

The recent gains are going to those who need it most. Over the past year, low-wage workers have experienced the fastest pay increases, a shift from earlier in the recovery, when wage growth was concentrated at the top.

Check out the Times’ graphic, too. In Stuart Varney’s interview of Larry Kudlow, Mr. Kudlow repeatedly kept referring to the economy being in the “sweet spot.”

PS- Check out John Hinderaker’s post on the economy. It’s both pithy and powerful.

The common theme amongst Democrat propagandists, aka Resistance journalists, is that the economy isn’t nearly as fantastic as people know it is. Take Juan Williams latest article, for instance.

Williams writes “After almost two-and-a-half years with Trump in the White House, including two years with Republican control of both houses of Congress, the middle class is getting squeezed to a pulp. The rich got their Trump tax cut. GDP looks good. And the stock market is doing great for people with money to invest. But it is only the rich who get the big rewards in Trump’s economy. What about the middle class?”

Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, has an explanation for Williams in this interview with Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal:

Incomes keep rising, with the lowest incomes growing at the fastest rate. Minority unemployment is the lowest in history. The unemployment rate for women is the lowest it’s been in 50+ years. Paychecks are bigger, partially because of the rising wages, partially because of the tax cuts. Disposable incomes are rising, too. Williams’ spin that “the middle class is getting squeezed to a pulp” is fiction.

The average family making $75,000 saved $2,300 in taxes last year. How is that like “getting squeezed to a pulp”? If that’s Williams’ definition of getting squeezed to a pulp, sign me up. Lost in all of this is the fact that wage growth for people in the bottom quintile are rising at a 6.4% rate, almost doubling the wage growth overall, which is at 3.4%.

I don’t know what Williams is talking about when he asks “What about the middle class”? Does he automatically trust everything that Media Matters feeds him? Listen to this BS:

Wages remain stagnant. Trump’s trade wars are hurting farmers. Coal mines keep closing. Teachers in several states have been on strike.

That first sentence is utter BS. That isn’t my opinion. That’s what the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) is reporting. Further, people that’d left the workforce are returning to the workforce.

Further, President Obama’s trade deals had already been hurting farmers. At least with President Trump, there’s a strong possibility that they won’t be hurt in the future. As for coal mines closing, the markets are determining what’s happening; with newer power plants switching to natural gas, the switch was inevitable. With the Obama administration, they simply attempted shutting down the entire coal industry through regulations.

Do people who watch the markets agree with Trump? Not Rick Newman of Yahoo Finance. He wrote in his column last week:

“If Trump deserves credit for a roaring stock market then Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan do as well. In fact, all of them presided over more total highs in the S&P 500 than Trump so far.”

Certainly, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan deserve credit for robust economic growth. President Obama can’t take credit for robust economic growth during his time in office because economic growth during his administration was pathetic. Stock market growth the result of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, not President Obama’s economic policies.

When President Trump took office, economic growth was pathetic, wages were legitimately stagnant and people were leaving the workforce in droves. President Trump got rid of the Obama administration’s policies and replaced them with pro-growth economic policies. Since President Trump’s and the GOP’s policies have kicked in, economic growth has doubled, consumer confidence and small business confidence have hit all-time highs and people are returning to work. If Williams thinks that President Obama deserves part of the credit or that it’s purely coincidental, he isn’t paying attention.

James Freeman’s WSJ article has a wonderful tongue-in-cheek quality to it.

Freeman’s article starts by saying “What would we do without experts? As U.S. workers continue to enjoy a vibrant job market, they should spare a thought for laborers in one category of professional services who remain mired in a multi-year slump. Established manufacturers of Keynesian economic forecasts have entered a prolonged period of secular stagnation. Some may even wonder if they can ever break out of a ‘new normal’ of declining prestige.”

Freeman’s article continues, saying “At the New York Times recently, economist Paul Krugman valiantly attempted to overcome his history of underrating American potential by making another call on tax policy and the macroeconomy. On April 8, Mr. Krugman wrote about one of President Trump’s signature policy achievements: ‘…his one major legislative success, the 2017 tax cut — which he predicted would be ‘rocket fuel’ for the economy, has turned out to be a big fizzle, economically and, especially, politically. It’s true that U.S. economic growth got a bump for two quarters last year, and Trumpists are still pretending to believe that we’ll have great growth for a decade. But at this point last year’s growth is looking like a brief and rapidly fading sugar high.”

On the old show Hee-Haw, one of their famous skits showed 4 men singing:

The famous line was “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” I’d say that’s pretty fitting for the ‘slump’ that Mr. Krugman is in. He once was a world-renowned economist. These days, he’s just a partisan hack for the NYTimes. It isn’t limited to Krugman, though:

A former Clinton and Obama economic adviser, Mr. Summers wrote in May of 2017 in the Washington Post:
Details of President Trump’s first budget have now been released. Much can and will be said about the dire social consequences of what is in it and the ludicrously optimistic economic assumptions it embodies. My observation is that there appears to be a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course.

Apparently, the budget forecasts that U.S. economic growth will rise to 3.0 percent because of the administration’s policies, largely its tax cuts and perhaps also its regulatory policies. Fair enough if you believe in tooth fairies and ludicrous supply-side economics.

These days, Summers and Krugman are nothing more than elitist economic snobs sneering down their noses at the notion that supply-side economics is the stuff that only tooth fairies peddled. Forgive me if I ignore their snobbishness.

Finally, there’s this:

Harriet Torry reports in the Journal on the optimism among corporate executives, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon:

“People are going back to the workforce. Companies have plenty of capital,” he said, adding that “business confidence and consumer confidence are both rather high…it could go on for years. There’s no law that says it has to stop,” he said.

At some point, it will stop. It’s just that there’s no guarantee it’ll be anytime soon.