New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predicts that Donald Trump will take credit for all of President Joe Biden's economic successes over the past four years — and anticipates that the President-elect's fans have no idea of the damage his policies could cause.
Krugman began a conversation with The New Republic's Greg Sargent by saying that Americans don't understand how essential immigrants are to the U.S. economy.
"It is something like maybe 8 million undocumented workers in the United States, something like 5 percent of the workforce," he said. "You say, OK, that would be pretty bad if we lose that, but how bad could it be? And the answer is that they are not evenly distributed.
"The whole food supply chain is reliant on people who are going to be rounded up and put in camps."
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He said that many people don't understand how food gets to their table, from planting to picking, processing, transporting and stocking. Slogans and absolutist ideas like throwing out immigrants are going to cause "a pretty big shock to people’s cost of living and the way they live," he added.
What became clear this election, he said, is that Americans have very little information about the basics of what Trump was proposing and how it will impact them. After the election was over, Americans searching for information on what a tariff is and how it will impact them spiked over 1,650%, according to Google Trends.
"I’ve been seeing now repeated focus groups after the election with Trump voters who are shocked to find out that tariffs are taxes. And they’ve been deliberately misinformed by Trump people," said Krugman.
One such claim, he said, came from Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who told voters that once immigrants are gone, more jobs will be available to Americans.
But that currently redundant workforce doesn't exist, said Krugman.
"We have essentially full employment among native-born Americans. There is no reserve of Americans to take these jobs, by and large jobs that native-born Americans would be very reluctant to take," he said. "People have absolutely no idea — a quorum of people who voted in this election have absolutely no idea of what’s coming down the pike."
He went on to say Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser who will become the deputy chief of staff for policy, "doesn’t just want to go after low-wage migrants from Latin America.
"He wants to go after high-skilled executives in Silicon Valley because this idea is that there are these jobs and they should be going to Americans. I would be surprised if they actually back off on this. They’ll go quite a ways, and the business community will scream."
Sargent asked about Biden's investments in green manufacturing and rebuilding American infrastructure, anticipating that Trump would take credit for all of them. Krugman agreed, saying that it's happened before. He said Trump took credit for what President Barack Obama did after the economic crash in 2007-2008.
"Disturbing scenario," Sargent summarized. "Trump will take credit for the recovery that is being handed to him, then say his anti-immigrant agenda is driving it."