Former President Donald Trump and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman rarely agree on much, but as far as the gamesmanship Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is deploying on the debt ceiling crisis, the two men are on the same page.
[Background: Trump has called Krugman a “loser,” a “clown,” and a “third rate economist” who “gets everything wrong.” Krugman has frequently returned the praise in kind, calling Trump “unfit to lead,” etc.]
Still they agree that McCarthy’s current tactics are indefensible.
Trump spoke resolutely from the Oval Office in 2019 about how the debt ceiling was not an issue that should ever be conflated with another. Trump said the debt limit issue was so obvious and so critical to the nation’s well-being that even he and Nancy Pelosi were in agreement — both attesting that the debt ceiling should never be used as a “negotiation wedge.”
“I can’t imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge,” Trump said. “That’s a sacred element of our country. They can’t use the debt ceiling to negotiate.”
This week on The Podcast – @paulkrugman on The Debt Ceiling. Here Krugman equates what Republicans are doing to financial terrorism. Listen to the full episode: https://t.co/1WNqgF4qC8 pic.twitter.com/kdBfOzLFVg
— Al Franken (@alfranken) May 7, 2023
Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008, expounds on just how sacred it is, saying in an interview with former Sen. Al Franken that McCarthy and his colleagues — in trying to force budgetary concessions from the White House by withholding their support for raising the debt limit — are engaged in “financial terrorism.”
Krugman explains grimly what he says House Republicans, led by McCarthy, are doing: “This is saying we are going to try through terror to get something that we couldn’t get through the normal mechanisms of democracy.”
