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Trump's Delusions Of Competence By Paul Krugman

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Paul Krugman is an American Economist, as well as a distinguished professor of economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He considers himself to be a liberal, as can be seen on his blog- the conscience of a liberal. Krugman writes about economics and politics. Krugman writes about both Trump and Hillary, and it seems he favors Hillary more than trump. Trump’s Delusions of Competence is the name of an article written by Paul Krugman. In this article he talks about how people think that Trump can manage the economy better than Hillary because he is a very successful businessman. At first he questions why people might think this way, then In the article he states” The answer, I suspect, is that voters see Mr. Trump …show more content…

Does him knowing how to manage a business automatically make him more qualified? Krugman states “Does business success carry with it the knowledge and instincts needed to make good economic policy? No, it doesn’t.” The answer is no, it doesn’t make him more qualified than Hillary. Krugman also says “But while we haven’t had many business leaders in the White House, we do know what kind of advice prominent businessmen give on economic policy. And it’s often startlingly bad, for two reasons. One is that wealthy, powerful people sometimes don’t know what they don’t know — and who’s going to tell them? The other is that a country is nothing like a corporation, and running a national economy is nothing like running a business.” While Trump might be a very successful business man that doesn’t mean that he will be successful at running the economy, because as Krugman said running a national economy is nothing like running a business. He then talks about how trump said that our wages are too high and sort of hinted at wage cuts. Krugman says “these feedback effects from wage cuts aren’t the sort of things …show more content…

He starts with saying “Mrs. Clinton’s core message was that the federal government can and should use its influence to push for higher wages.” Unlike trump who said that our wages were too high and most likely wanted wage cuts, Hillary wants to push for higher wages. Krugman starts talking about labor wages and the why it may be low or the problems with it. The article states “In particular, the conventional wisdom attributed rising inequality to technological change, which was raising the demand for highly educated workers while devaluing blue-collar work. And there was nothing much policy could do to change the trend, other than aiding low-wage workers via subsidies like the earned-income tax credit.” This isn’t true according to Krugman because there is no evidence that highly educated workers actually helped much. He states “But the case for “skill-biased technological change” as the main driver of wage stagnation has largely fallen apart. Most notably, high levels of education have offered no guarantee of rising incomes — for example, wages of recent college graduates, adjusted for inflation, have been flat for 15 years.” This shows that the employment of highly educated workers isn’t really helping the economy as the wage for recent college graduates has been flat for 15 years. Now he begins talking about how raising the minimum wage isn’t actually a bad thing.

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