Who Cares About Economists Anyway?

Multiple news outlets in tandem have declared that roughly ⅔ of economists think Trump’s policies will worsen inflation more than Kamala’s will, with Paul Krugman declaring it “close to unanimity.” But this is ridiculous because it’s not how it works.

Depending on who holds Congress will certainly help determine what even becomes policy. If the Dems have control, nothing of Trump’s will get passed. And even if the Republicans are in charge, a lot of the Republicans and libertarians won’t pass some of his initiatives because, economically, they aren’t that good. On the other hand, if the Dems have Congress, Harris’s stuff will certainly sail through because of the progressive bias.

Furthermore, even in the narrow sense of looking just strictly at the tax policy details, it’s illusory. The most important parts of the economy that really dictate how the economy is doing are invisible. These are the non-tax parts, such as regulation or expansive government agencies, and on those issues, Trump is by far better on policy than Harris. These are the areas that destroy or strangle an economy and Harris’s policies will make things much worse.

On a related note, I find it laughable sometimes how much stock the press puts into economist positions these days, when you consider back in 2021, when Congress was Congress was debating Biden’s $5 Trillion Build Back Better plan, 17 Nobel Prize winning economists signed an open letter urging passage of this atrocious spending bill

The letter opened and closed with these two absurd statements: “The American economy appears set for a robust recovery in part due to active government interventions over the past year and a half” and “[the agenda] will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.” At the time of their writing, inflation was at (only) 6% and we eventually surpassed past 8%.

How much more egregious would things be had Congress actually passed the full spending bill? And even more critically, how is it that 17 prize-winning economists managed to get their economic forecast so wrong? This is why, in the current political climate, caring about what a handful of economists think is really quite useless.