Krugman: The Age of Fake Policy

President-elect Donald Trump listens to Vice President-elect Mike Pence at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, on Dec. 1, 2016. Days after visiting the plant, Trump took to Twitter to warn businesses thinking about moving jobs abroad that there will be a 35 percent tax levied against goods brought back for sale.
President-elect Donald Trump listens to Vice President-elect Mike Pence at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, on Dec. 1, 2016. Days after visiting the plant, Trump took to Twitter to warn businesses thinking about moving jobs abroad that there will be a 35 percent tax levied against goods brought back for sale.

On Thursday, at a rough estimate, 75,000 Americans were laid off or fired by their employers. Some of those workers will find good new jobs, but many will end up earning less, and some will remain unemployed for months or years.

If that sounds terrible to you, and you're asking what economic catastrophe just happened, the answer is, none.

The U.S. economy is, after all, huge, employing 145 million people. It's also ever-changing: Industries and companies rise and fall, and there are always losers as well as winners. The result is constant "churn," with many jobs disappearing even as still more new jobs are created. In an average month, there are 1.5 million "involuntary" job separations (as opposed to voluntary quits), or 75,000 per working day. Hence my number.

But why am I telling you this? To highlight the difference between real economic policy and the fake policy that has lately been taking up far too much attention in the news media.

Real policy involves large sums of money and affects broad swathes of the economy. Repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would snatch away hundreds of billions in insurance subsidies to low- and middle-income families and cause around 30 million people to lose coverage, would certainly qualify. Consider, by contrast, the story that dominated several news cycles a few weeks ago: Donald Trump's intervention to stop Carrier from moving jobs to Mexico. Some reports say that 800 U.S. jobs were saved. Even accepting the most positive spin, for every worker whose job was saved in that deal, around a hundred others lost their jobs the same day.

In other words, it may have sounded as if Trump was doing something substantive by intervening with Carrier, but he wasn't. This was fake policy - a show intended to impress the rubes, not to achieve real results. The same goes for the hyping of Ford's decision to add 700 jobs in Michigan - or for that matter, Trump's fact-challenged denunciation of General Motors for manufacturing the Chevy Cruze in Mexico (that factory mainly serves foreign markets, not the U.S.).

Did the incoming administration have anything to do with Ford's decision? Can political pressure change GM's strategy? It hardly matters: Case-by-case intervention from the top is never going to have a significant impact on a $19 trillion economy.

So why are such stories occupying so much of the media's attention?

The incoming administration's incentive to engage in fake policy is obvious: It's the natural counterpart to fake populism. Trump won overwhelming support from white working-class voters, who believed he was on their side. Yet his real policy agenda, aside from the looming trade war, is standard-issue modern Republicanism: huge tax cuts for billionaires and savage cuts to public programs, including those essential to many Trump voters.

So what can Trump do to keep the scam going? The answer is, showy but trivial interventions that can be spun as saving a few jobs here or there. Substantively, this will never amount to more than a rounding error in a giant nation. But it may well work as a PR strategy, at least for a while.

Bear in mind that corporations have every incentive to go along with the spin.

Keeping a few hundred jobs in the United States for a couple of years is a pretty cheap form of campaign contribution; pretending that the administration persuaded you to add some jobs you actually would have added anyway is even cheaper.

Still, none of this would work without the complicity of the news media. And I'm not talking about "fake news," as big a problem as that is becoming; I'm talking about respectable, mainstream news coverage.

Sorry, folks, but headlines that repeat Trump claims about jobs saved, without conveying the essential fakeness of those claims, are a betrayal of journalism. This is true even if, as often happens, the articles eventually, quite a few paragraphs in, get around to debunking the hype: many if not most readers will take the headline as validation of the claim.

It is, I suppose, possible that fake policy will eventually produce a media backlash - that news organizations will begin treating stunts like the Carrier episode with the ridicule they deserve. But nothing we've seen so far inspires optimism.

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