Kevin Hassett's Record Of Being Wrong

Click here for an article at The New York Times by Paul Krugman, entitled "Trump and His Infallible Advisers," subtitled "Beware men who never admit having been wrong." (Like Trump, for example.)

Kevin Hasset, a "former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers," has emerged as Trump's champion for reopening the economy (at a cost of tens of thousands of lives).

He first attracted widespread attention as co-author of a 1999 book claiming that stocks were greatly undervalued, and that the Dow should be 36,000 (which would be around 55,000 today, adjusting for inflation). It quickly became clear that there were major conceptual errors in that book; but Hassett never admitted error.

In the mid-2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting that only liberals believed that there was.

In 2010 Hassett was part of a group of conservative economists and pundits who warned in an open letter that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to rescue the economy would lead to currency debasement and inflation. Four years later Bloomberg News tried to reach signatories to ask why that inflation never materialized; not one was willing to admit having been wrong.

Finally, Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in business investment; it didn’t, but he insisted that it did.

But Hassett is far from being alone among Trump's misguided economic advisers:

And Hassett isn’t even uniquely bad. Unlike, say, Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to put on the Federal Reserve Board, he does not, as far as I know, have a history of simply getting basic numbers and facts wrong.

And, as for Trump:

Yes, Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.

Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.