Donald Trump is being blamed -- rightly -- for the debacle that is happening in the United States. But the problem, Paul Krugman writes, goes far beyond Trump. It goes to people who have long been icons on the American Right. During the pandemic, Trump has sought advice from Kevin Hassett:
Trump was unhappy with epidemiological models suggesting a death toll over 100,000 — which, by the way, now seems highly likely. So the White House created its own team led by Kevin Hassett, whom The [Washington] Post describes as “a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases.” And this team produced an analysis Trump aides interpreted as implying a much lower death toll.
[Hassett] first attracted widespread attention as co-author of a 1999 book claiming that stocks were greatly undervalued, and that the Dow should be 36,000 (which would be around 55,000 today, adjusting for inflation). It quickly became clear that there were major conceptual errors in that book; but Hassett never admitted error.
In the mid-2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting that only liberals believed that there was.
In 2010 Hassett was part of a group of conservative economists and pundits who warned in an open letter that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to rescue the economy would lead to currency debasement and inflation. Four years later Bloomberg News tried to reach signatories to ask why that inflation never materialized; not one was willing to admit having been wrong.
Finally, Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in business investment; it didn’t, but he insisted that it did.
You would think that, with a record like that, people would stop listening to Kevin Hassett. But not Trump.
Then there is the case of Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to install on the Federal Reserve Board, who "as far as I know, [has] a history of simply getting basic numbers and facts wrong."
Trump promised to populate his administration with "all the best people." But, on the American Right, the "best people" -- like Trump himself -- are colossal frauds.
Image: Vox
