When MAGA Meets Minsky - P. Krugman
Laying the foundations for the next financial crisis
Paul Krugman
Feb 21, 2025
Sometimes — actually, quite often — it seems as if the Musk/Trump administration tries to undermine successful government policies precisely because they’ve been successful.
It’s hard, for example, to see whose interests Trump is serving by trying to kill New York’s congestion pricing scheme, which is already showing clear positive results, including a noticeable decline in traffic accidents. If you think he cares deeply about the relatively small number of people who commute into lower Manhattan by car (many of whom seem to like the policy!), I have a Melania coin you might want to buy.
This behavior may in part reflect the right-wing insistence, going back to Reagan, that government can never be a force for good, a doctrine right-wingers try to validate when they’re in power. Part of it may reflect jealousy: Trump, and only Trump, is allowed to have policy successes.
But it’s also surely part of the effort to flood the zone — to do so many bad things at the same time that it’s hard to focus on any one outrage. And I’m sorry to say that this strategy often works. In a week in which Trump has firmly allied himself with Russian aggression while falsely claiming that millions of dead people receive Social Security, how many people noticed Tuesday’s executive order that appears to be an effort to strip the Federal Reserve of its ability to oversee and regulate Wall Street?
Continued https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/when-maga-meets-minsky
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