Economist Paul Krugman was blasted on social media, and by an economist who spoke to FOX Business, over a tweet claiming that the latest CPI numbers show that inflation is "over" and that it was defeated at "little cost."
"The war on inflation is over," Krugman, an economic professor at City University of New York and a New York Times columnist, posted Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter.
"We won, at very little cost."
The post was tagged with a "community note" by X that said, "The exclusion of food, shelter, energy, and used cars is misleading. All prices included in CPI shows year over year inflation at 3.7% as of September 2023."
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EJ Antoni, research fellow in regional economics with The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, told FOX Business that Krugman’s tweet is "dishonest."
"Krugman’s so-called analysis would make Goebbels blush at its dishonesty," Antoni said. "This is another example that if you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything. Krugman literally removed 58.006% of the entire CPI index to bring inflation down to 2%.
"That in and of itself is damning with faint praise because it means even if you exclude the fastest growing components of the index, there’s still inflation and virtually no prices anywhere have come down for consumers."
Antoni continued, "While Krugman is at it, he might as well remove a few more components of the index if he really wants to bring the number down. For example, according to my latest estimates, if you remove the whole CPI from the CPI, then inflation goes to zero. Krugman would presumably title such a graph ‘CPI ex CPI’ and tout it as the ultimate proof of Bidenomics’ success."
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Antoni was joined by many users on social media in his criticism of Krugman.
"Outside of food, energy costs, the cost of housing and buying cars, we won the ‘war on inflation,'" Outkick writer Ian Miller posted on X. "How did anyone ever take people like this seriously? Just completely in denial of anything that makes his political party look bad."
Krugman seemingly walked back his original post on X with a follow-up post.
"I was too flip here," Krugman said. "I've been using this particular measure for a while, so want to be consistent. But it has flaws (medical insurance too optimistic). But almost every measure now <3 percent. 1/When you look at the whole distribution, we do seem quite close to prepandemic inflation 2/And PCE inflation, which doesn't share the same flaws, showing us closing in on 2 percent. E.g. 3/People have been reluctant to call this. But the data really want to tell us that inflation has very nearly normalized."
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Krugman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from FOX Business.
"Krugman’s sycophantic tweet is fallacious, not only for its explicit error of effectively creating a useless index which is not representative of literally any consumer’s spending habits, but also for its implications," Antoni told FOX Business.
"What Krugman is implicitly saying is that if you’re homeless, starving, and freezing to death, things aren’t so bad because everything else is affordable. Alfred Nobel is rolling over in his grave with his eponymous award being given to such a charlatan as Krugman."
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Krugman has long drawn the ire of conservatives over his predictions and commentary on the economy and was criticized in August of last year for claiming the economy was experiencing a "Biden boom."
In July 2021, Krugman published an op-ed titled "I Was Wrong About Inflation" where he wrote that he was on "Team Relaxed" when it came to fears of inflation and acknowledged that was a "very bad call."
