 Welcome to the podcast that takes apart Paul Krugman's New York Times column. Join us as Tom Woods and Bob Murphy teach economics by uncovering and dissecting the arrows of Krugman. Nobel Prize winner, newspaper columnist and destroyer of nations. It's time for Contra Krugman. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Tom Woods. This is Bob Murphy. And this is episode 87 of Contra Krugman, live here in Seattle. As Betsy mentioned, Bob and I do this every week. We release an episode of Contra Krugman every week. We review one of the two New York Times columns that Krugman has released that week and we critique it. We search and search for something to find wrong in that column and then we teach economics by doing so. There are a few inside jokes in the podcast that will be understood by people who've been listening to a number of them. So if some people laugh at something and you're not following it, I don't know, what's our advice in that situation? Just laugh and pretend that you get the joke. Laugh and pretend that you get the joke. Listen to the podcast more often, which you can do at ContraKrugman.com. This episode being number 87, the show notes page is ContraKrugman.com slash 87. It's not up yet. It will be by the time this is being heard by our normal audience, but you folks are hearing it as we're recording it. So what we're doing this time is we're actually zipping through three of his columns just to give you a sense of what we do. So because some of his columns will cover just one topic, we want to cover a multitude of topics. So we're going to zip through three of them and they'll all be linked at that particular page. The first one is from May 8 and it's called Republicans Party Like It's 1984. It's my job here on the show. Bob graciously allows me to talk once in a while on the show and what I get to do is summarize the columns. So I'm going to give you really brief summaries. Like these are executive summaries like you're on your way to being executed and you have three seconds. That's how much of a summary I'm going to give you because we have three of them to do. So this one is from May 8, just not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago. And what the gist of this is that the Republicans, according to Krugman, more or less can't ever be trusted. All right, well, so far so good. But what he's arguing is that we got a whole lot of bluster about Obamacare. We need to repeal it. We're going to have this tremendous replacement. It's going to be wonderful and do all these great things. And he says, you know, the reality of what the Republicans gave us for legislation on healthcare fell rather short of expectations. He says, look, this thing breaks every promise the Republicans ever made about health. Deductibles are going to rise, not fall. Premiums may fall for a handful of young, healthy, affluent people, but they're going to rise for everybody else. They're going to be cutbacks for all sorts of vulnerable people. And this is exactly what they want to do. This is how Republicans are. They want to take health insurance away from people. I mean, he puts it quite that way, by the way, in a couple of these columns we're going to be talking about. This is what they naturally thrive on, which is taking away things from vulnerable people. And he says that according to independent estimates of an earlier version of Trump care, people with incomes over a million dollars will save an average of more than $50,000 a year. And there's a good chunk of GOPers for whom that's all they care about, is these folks at the top. So this is the style of the typical Krugman column. It goes after the GOP, says that they're only in it for the wealthy and they just want to hurt vulnerable people. So he says, I personally think that Donald Trump gets some positive pleasure out of people who made the mistake of trusting him for a ride. And he says, look, this is a freedom is slavery ignorance is strength moment. What we were presented for health care is positively or well. So the first column is to argue that the Republicans may have talked an awful lot about all the flaws of Obamacare, but then they turn around and give us something that is horrific and awful and in no way an improvement. Then secondly, May 12, 2017, Judas, I like how we're not getting too over the top here, Judas is trotted out. Judas tax cuts and the great betrayal. And he means Judas is a bad thing just to clarify. He's using Judas as a bet. And he's saying, and basically Judas here, we decided Judas was Mitch McConnell, more or less. And the argument in this column is that surely there are Republicans who know that Trump is probably in some way compromised by the Russians, but they are willing to overlook this because Trump is going to deliver them their greatest wish, which of course, what is a Republicans greatest wish? Taking health care away from vulnerable people. So as long as Trump is going to take health care away from vulnerable people, they'll look the other way about the Russia stuff. And so that's why McConnell is Judas. He's prepared to betray everybody. He's prepared to look the other way and betray everybody if he can just get what his heart truly desires, which is taking people's health care away. Now, you think, Woods, you must be summarizing this in a tendentious way. Nobody argues that way. Either you don't listen to Contra Krugman or you don't read his columns. Now, if you don't read his columns, you have a happier life. If you don't listen to Contra Krugman, it's sadder. I'm telling you, it's sadder. We have a fun podcast. What can I tell you? So Krugman generously says, look, we don't know for sure that top Trump officials and maybe even Trump himself are Russian puppets. We don't know that for sure. However, you know, wink, wink, he says. But you know what? This is typical of conservatives because after all, look at the America firsters from the 1930s. They loved foreign dictators just like Trump loves a foreign dictator. So this is typical of Republicans. There's nothing unusual about this. They're just reverting to form. Okay, that's two columns. The third one we're going to share with you today is the May 15th column, The Priming of Mr. Donald Trump. And here we have Krugman saying, isn't it ridiculous Donald Trump thinks he invented the term priming the pump to refer to the economy? Well, what Trump actually did was he gave an interview to The Economist magazine. And he said, we've got to cut taxes because we want to prime the pump. And Bob's going to talk a bit about that when we get to it. But Krugman, as most people took that to mean, because Trump then said, asked the reporter, are you familiar with this term, this use of this term? Because I wasn't and, you know, I made it up the other day and I rather like it. And people took this to mean, boy, this guy thinks he invented the term priming the pump. So we're going to talk about that. But anyway, the typical way that phrase is used is we need more government spending pumped into the economy to get the thing going. And Krugman spends the column explaining what that's all about and why it can be useful to do that. But what he's arguing now and what he indeed argued a few months ago was that, yes, even though Krugman for years has been calling for deficit spending, for years, bigger deficits. We need bigger deficits. All of a sudden in 2017, you'll never guess, now is the time to keep an eye on the deficit. All of a sudden we got to watch spending. That happened in 2017. We got to watch spending. He says, because things are totally different now from when I was talking about why we need to increase spending. Things are totally different, he says. And he goes through and gives you all these reasons that things are different now. They're so much different than they were like three months earlier when I was telling you we needed the opposite. So we're going to go through exactly what's allegedly different. We did do this, by the way, we devoted all of episode 69 of Contra Krugman to exactly that. To how different are things from the five minutes ago when he was saying we need to increase spending. And it turns out these indicators were exactly the same then as they are now. The one difference seems to be there's a guy with an R next to his name in the White House now and suddenly we got to be careful about deficits. So he is willing to say I would accept deficits if it's in exchange for more infrastructure. That he's fine with, he says, but really what does Trump want deficits for just so he could give tax cuts to his rich friends? Now you think, Woods, okay I listened to your summaries and this is all just like boilerplate. This sounds like a speech from the Democratic Party Convention from 1984. Like how could you possibly get any economic knowledge out of this? You can't. What you can do though is by teaching the opposite of everything he just said you can in fact convey some economic knowledge and Bob I am now going to place the burden of that task upon your shoulders. I'm going to hand you these columns back that you lent me. I don't really want them anymore. And now Bob I am going to let you start us off. Why don't we start off with the claim that premiums, health premiums would fall for maybe a handful of people if Obamacare were replaced. A handful of people. Right, so let me just read these. So Krugman's got this rhetorical style when he's talking about health care to try to minimize and just show the disparate impact. So he can't just say there's literally no single person in the United States who would benefit from this Republican plan. And I should say as a caveat because I know we have some people here who have never heard the podcast because Krugman holds up here. We don't even have to engage in hyperbole. He's literally calling the Republicans Judas. So this is the way he talks. So when we're criticizing him it comes off sometimes like we're defending the Republicans and it's not that so much. It's just more that we're saying no these claims are hyperbolic and let's look at this more accurately. So by no means should any of this come off like we're all in favor of the health reform that was coming out of D.C. lately. But we're just trying to show how misleading a lot of Krugman's claims are. So for example he says premiums may fall for a handful of young healthy affluent people but will rise in many cases. So he's using the term handful there when in fact this is obviously millions of people that the original Affordable Care Act the very nature of it was to sort of put everyone into comparable pools to make it illegal for health insurance companies to discriminate according to pre-existing conditions. It did things like say the spread between premiums on people based on age can only be a factor of three. So take two otherwise equivalent people but one person 70 the other person 22 then the health insurers under the Affordable Care Act could charge no more than three times the premium which is artificial you know that was a much narrower band that had been the case before. So obviously if you undo that well then now it's not that the young and healthy are implicitly subsidizing the older and the people with pre-existing conditions. So again just the rhetorical trick there of Krugman saying premiums may fall for a handful of people. Let me give you another example of what I mean here. So later in the same column he says according to independent estimates of an earlier version of Trump care people with incomes over one million dollars would save an average of more than $50,000 a year. Okay so he's Krugman's trying to show the despair like to say who are the winners and the losers and that's all he says about the fact that there are a large tax cuts involved with the Republican plan because again remember the Affordable Care Act came with huge tax increases that was partly how they were going to contain the impact on the deficit from all this you know new subsidies. So of course if you undo that well then that's going to be a huge tax cut. So let me just give you an example of how slippery Krugman can be. So if you and I should say what I've learned doing this podcast I thought in the beginning that you know to show the contrast of what Krugman's numbers are with more realistic ones you would have to go to like the Cato Institute or Heritage. No all you need to do typically is click the link and then see how it's the exact opposite of the way Krugman summarized it. So for this one just for example and I'll just give you these numbers time to turn back over to you. It's what Krugman said is true okay you can go to the link and you can find the table that he was talking about here but let me give you some more facts. So coming away from that you would think that oh yeah this is just for rich people. This table so it's from who is this from? It's from the Urban Institute. They did a tax assessment not of the most recent one that passed in the House but the original one that didn't get through but you know the grand scheme they're comparable. And so yes it is true they put a little thing in there saying for households that earn more than a million dollars a year on average they will save fifty thousand dollars on their tax bill and that is a shocking statistic but if you think about why what's driving that well it's because the Affordable Care Act included things like a 3.8 percent surtax on net investment income. Okay so clearly that kind of a tax is explicitly designed to help upper income people and so once you unroll that well then obviously it's going to help upper income people okay. But far be it's not true to say this is just for the upper crust for example if you add up all the people whose taxes go down it's fifty four point nine percent of all households right that's more than half. I know there's Austrians the crowd don't like mathematical economics but I'm just like fifty four point nine percent is more than half the country and yet from reading you know crewman's summer you would have thought it's just the upper crust and then the other thing I'll end on this time the group you know they haven't broken out in income categories the household group based on income who gets the highest percentage tax cut under the Republican plan that was in this thing are people who make less than ten thousand dollars a year that they get a four point eight percent income tax cut because of some you know premium tax credit that's part of the Republican plan. Okay so it's more than half the country gets their taxes cut and the biggest chunk in terms of percentage of income going down because the Republican goes to the poorest people and yet the way crewman summarized all the information that chart was to say oh yeah people making more than million dollars a year say more than fifty thousand this is crazy that's why Judas or no this this one they compared to Orwell it was 1984 Judas is next I got mixed up sorry. Can't keep track of all your all the wildly exaggerated language that he uses I want to read to you from my phone here the text just a paragraph or two from an interview I did with a physician maybe a year and a half ago it's a doctor Josh Umber who he and his father ran together for governor and lieutenant governor of Kansas on the Libertarian Party ticket and you know when we talk about health care half the time we're arguing these wonkish policy plans and a lot of us would like to just see a genuine free market in health care just physicians and patients and that's it but it's hard to imagine what that would look like because we have such a distorted market we have so much government involvement we have an artificial encouragement of the of health insurance in general because of tax privileges and so on and so it's hard for us to imagine what life would look like in the absence of this well doctor Umber is a great example of what it would look like because he's more or less trying to operate as if there were no government or insurance he runs his practice it's called its atlas dot md he runs his practice like a membership service where you pay a monthly fee and you get everything he offers as part of that monthly fee whatever you need and so I want to read this is this is real this is happening right now this is this is doctor Umber speaking to me he says it's a flat rate per month based on age just like a gym membership for that membership you get unlimited home visits work visits office visits technology visits like email cell phone texting twitter facebook skype basically whatever we want because now we're not limited to what insurance will allow or pay for this is generally by the way fifty dollars a month fifty dollars a month he says then we have two days in our office any procedure we can do in the office is included free of charge because that's what the membership is covering just like any equipment in the gym is included at the base membership price so stitches biopsies joint injections ultrasounds bone scans lung scans urine testing strep throat testing minor surgical procedures all included for free then one more paragraph he says then something else we can do that makes us very unique and valuable is wholesale medications labs imaging and pathology had a perfect example recently we ordered some blood work we have our negotiated cash discounts of usually ninety five percent and a patient's blood work was accidentally billed through the insurance rate because because of a computer mistake at the lab the price they were quoted was one thousand twenty eight dollars we ran that back through our system and it costs thirty nine dollars and it's an amazing opportunity so anyway so then he says up we can do the same things with medications week we out compete the wall marks the cbs the targets of the world because we have a different business model we can dispense medications in Kansas just like a pharmacist forty four states allow physicians to function like this so I can order the medications wholesale from the same place as the pharmacies do but I can get a thousand blood pressure pills for eight dollars and thirty three cents even after my ten percent markup they're under a penny a pill Walmart would literally have to give them away to out compete us and if they do great we still win it's not a value that's of that's a revenue generator for us we're simply adding to the value of our membership it's very cost-go-esque you're gonna want to read this entire interview because it's stunning alright that that sounds like it's from Mars right that doesn't sound like anything that we're accustomed to and yet it's going on right now so I am going to invite you to do something Bob's gonna roll his eyes but let him roll them it's my turn okay I thought you're gonna say it was your show no contrary it's a fifty percent share yeah that almost slipped out just now didn't it if you got a smart phone I'm gonna send you I just wrote an e-book on health care it's called your Facebook friends are wrong about health care I was so happy with that title all you gotta do is to you're gonna text a word to a number the number is three three four four four and I'll send you this awesome thing including that interview to the number three three four four four just text as all one word health care text health care is all one word three three four before you get that e-book now if you're saying to me if you're out there you're saying woods I don't have a smart phone and I'm feeling very very left out and depressed at this moment what can you do for me I bought the domain name your friends are wrong dot com you can also get the book there how was that available where's the creativity in America anymore how was I able to buy that for ten smackers all right anyway so get that you'll really enjoy Bob let's talk about are you done selling stuff I'm selling something that's free I might add that's even worse that's a good one all right don't cost you nothing all right let's talk about Judas and Russia right now in that column all right so Bob maybe you want to say a little something but just interest doesn't matter but the whole the whole Russia thing I personally think is a bit overblown that doesn't mean I'm the world's biggest fan of Donald Trump obviously but the creepy people who are behind the scenes here give me the willies even more than he does but that's my my personal opinion is that they are more sinister than he is but yeah yeah yeah say I mean but I'm just gonna say there's I've talked to a lot of people about this and Bob I mean we've for the most part we're just spectators this we're reading the news like anybody and I'm still waiting to hear what the big horrible thing is I'm supposed to be worried about right so again this is another area where you know it's certainly it's not that you know Tom and I checked that out and actually Russia had nothing to do with the election it's all good you know how could we know we wouldn't I can't prove a negative but the point is for somebody like Krugman in particular let me just walk through how dubious this story is or how tenuous his position because for those of you who've been listening to the show or reading Krugman's columns you know that he was absolutely furious with Comey when he came out you know shortly before the election and understandably so Hillary was Krugman's candidate what Comey did was kind of shocking and then especially since then they retracted it a few days later and said oh actually okay no there's nothing here go ahead get everyone going votes fine so I get why Krugman would have been furious and then you know when then Hillary loses of course and so that was Krugman's refrain right it's not that Hillary Clinton it couldn't possibly be that she lost the election fair and square they're had to be cheating and so in many columns and blog posts that whenever Krugman would talk about the latest you know outrage from the Trump administration he would say thanks Comey right and so that was like his sort of snarky way of saying look good job Comey you through the election okay so again in Krugman's mind you know is this guy Comey somebody who's trustworthy an upstanding public servant no this is a guy who through the election clearly you know he must have known that there was nothing there and yet for some reason he did something having to know how much they would throw the election so in Krugman's mind this guy Comey clearly you know is a bad apple all right I don't know to be fair I don't know that Krugman ever said that he should resign or he should be fired certainly many Democrats did say that stuff before okay now of course all of a sudden Krugman's repeating just matter of factly all the things we know about what happened for example we just know that Trump told Comey you know it'd be great if you could just let this thing with Flynn go away you know I'm paraphrasing but you guys have all heard that the thing that's coming from this memo and so let me just make sure you get the timeline of what happened here so as of like let's say January Krugman would have been saying thanks Comey for you know throwing the election complete dereliction of duty Flynn actually resigned on February 13th this meeting in which Trump allegedly told Comey hey can you back off Flynn happened the next day February 14th okay so make sure you realize the timeline here even according even if this everything is true that Comey's talking about in these this memo that he just supposedly wrote up it's not that Flynn was still safely in his job and Trump was kind of contained thing Flynn everything had already blown up and Flynn had to resign and that's the day afterwards so again it's not clear you know even if this did happen it could be the Trump just meant the guys careers rule he's going to go down in history as a Russian spy basically can you at least stop investigating the guy it's again we don't know but that's the context it's not that he was trying to prevent people from learning the truth the guy had already resigned the day before Comey says nothing about this you know all through it and the senator says to him I'm slightly paraphrasing but this is close said you know hypothetically speaking if the attorney general or senior officials at the department of justice were to lean on the FBI and say they wanted you to drop a pending investigation could they do that and Comey says theoretically yes and the senator comes back and says has that ever happened in your experience and Comey says no not my experience that would clearly you know cause a lot of things if they interfered with an investigation like that so again it's possible that Comey was you know thinking no strictly speaking he asked me about the attorney general and you know department justice officials not the president himself but that would have been a good time to say by the way Trump actually did you know obstruct justice a few months ago but he Comey didn't say anything in response to those questions and the only time he this comes out is after he gets fired you know I'm just saying it's weird that this guy who Krugman was vilifying as you know this corrupt guy who's through the election now after he gets fired this stuff comes out that arguably he misled senators under testimony or under oath to say there was no nobody from the you know executive branch leaning on me or higher levels to drop this investigation so I'll turn it back to you Tom all right yeah something needs to be said about a highly highly unfashionable group that is targeted by the U.S. and that's what I'm talking about a big friend oh no I don't know I don't even I don't want to see them ever again actually but thank you for thanks for the option it's it's the America First Committee now nobody nobody likes them today because they were on the wrong side of history didn't they know that in a World War II needed to be needed to be fought in the way that it was fought now a lot of the America First Committee didn't have one but that that was more or less their view now then of course after the attack on Pearl Harbor America First closed its doors the very next day well Krugman says in the column that many he uses the word many of their most prominent members openly supported foreign dictators by which of course he would mean Hitler so I did what Bob has taught me because I'm really in a Bob's my mentor I mean really there's nobody on earth who knows Krugman better than Bob and who knows Krugman's tactics so Bob always told me whenever Krugman makes a claim and he uses a link to link you to the evidence for the claim click the link because he's bluffing half the time he doesn't think you're going to click the link you click it and as Bob will show as shown half the time the link says the opposite of what Krugman says so I did it this time I clicked the link where in episode 87 he's finally taking my advice so I clicked through who are these many people from the America First committee despite the fact the America First committee openly and expressly said you're not welcome in the America First movement if you have any foreign sympathies whatsoever including for fascism or socialism or communism or anything you are not welcome anyway so who were these many people so I clicked on and there was only one person who was even remotely accused of this at the link and that was Charles Lindbergh who even he obviously was not sympathetic to foreign dictators given that he fought in the war against those dictators you don't normally go bomb people you sympathize with and you also don't go over as Lindbergh did he went over to Germany saw the German force up close got all the details he could about it and then came home and shared it all with American intelligence oops so there's actually an interesting book on the whole Lindbergh matter by James Duffy that I recommend it's called Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt the rivalry that divided America but the longer the short of it is that was the only name I could find in that link other people who I would consider to be rather prominent who were associated would be names like Gerald Ford JFK even for a time there were literary figures well first of all there were Norman Thomas there were several progressive senators they had 850,000 members overall there were literary figures like Sinclair Lewis and EE Cummings all kinds of names you associate with traditional Americana not one of whom had the slightest sympathy for any foreign dictator let's go to the priming of the pump thing because Bob read the interview with the economist that Donald Trump did and so therefore Bob's qualified to speak on it so go ahead and do that in case you didn't hear this people were making fun of Trump left and right literally left and right were making fun of him because there was this awkward sentence that came out of this so Trump had I think it was two people from the Economist magazine had come in and did an interview with him and so it was being shared around and everyone was saying oh my gosh Trump is even more of an imbecile and you know an idiot that we thought and he's even crazier and so on so again I clicked and went to go read it and I was I have to tell you in terms of if you were worried about you know is Trump just kind of like putting on a show you know some of his over the top bambastic statements aren't indicating of his mental state of health that you would have thought this thing actually reassured me that Trump is very reasonable he talks for example talking with you know NAFTA and Trump had threatened he was going to pull out and then he gets phone calls from you know the prime minister president of Mexico and he says in the interview they asked me can you postpone can we talk about this and I said okay out of respect for them okay so that's not like the crazy Trump image that you get that he says out of respect for you know the leader of Mexico I decided to reconsider right so I'm just saying things like that another example people were saying oh in this interview Trump says that he introduced the world to Mike Pence but that's not true that's a dirty lie people knew who Pence was if you go and look it up what Trump's doing is so he's talking to the interviewers and then he goes hey has anybody heard of Mike Pence the vice president and then Pence walks in so Trump's putting on a show it's like a wrestling match you know he's like get your hands together for vice president Mike Pence that's what he was doing he wasn't saying had anybody heard this guy before and you know picked him as my vice president so I'm saying little things like that he's like people almost willfully trying not to understand another quick example in this interview Trump's talking about NAFTA and he says the U.S. has a trade deficit with Canada right now and he throws out some number and Matt Iglesias at Vox says that's a dirty rotten lie we actually I was curious so I'm sort of a sleuth what I did is I went to Google and I typed in U.S. Canada trade balance literally the first hit was to the Census Bureau I clicked it and the number matched what Trump said so it's like that's weird so what happened was Iglesias was looking at the goods and services which was a surplus Trump was just looking at the goods okay so fair enough but again that's little things like that where clearly you know rather than trying to say it's weird Trump would lie and make up a specific number that's totally instead of just trying to figure out where did he get that number from and realize oh he was talking about the goods deficit just nope he's a liar okay so the last thing this issue about the prime the prompt so Trump says we have to prime the pump and the economist person says it's very Keynesian and then Trump says we're the highest tax nation in the world have you heard that expression before for this particular type of event and the economist guy says priming the pump and Trump says yeah have you heard of it yes have you heard that expression used before because I haven't heard it I mean I just I came up with it a couple days ago and I thought it was good it's what you have to do okay so that's the snippet that they quoted and so my point is Trump talks funny he says weird stuff but if Trump were really saying I invented I coined this phrase two days ago would he have had three follow you know introductory question to say have you ever heard that before right if I claim that I made up a new song and say to Tom hey have you ever heard this song before and then you know sing a few bars of it and then because I made it up yesterday that wouldn't make any sense right you know what I'm saying so I think possibly what happened is Trump was saying like I hadn't heard that phrase in this context where I stumbled across it and now that's what we're using because I think it's a cool phrase have you ever heard it used like that before so yeah certainly it shows he's not a policy wonk it didn't realize Keynesians have been using that since the 30s but I don't think Trump was claiming I coined this phrase two days ago because otherwise his earlier questions make no sense let's just really quickly hit the we can't have deficit spending now because conditions are totally changed because he says you know he's talking about quit rates and stuff like that just give us 30 seconds of why when he first made that claim few months ago it turns out that months earlier when he was saying we do need deficit spending all these factors that he said are now totally different were exactly the same then when under Obama he was saying we need deficit spending right so we had an episode number 69 yes an episode 69 we had crewmen had the best column of all time it was literally titled deficits matter again okay imagine that one because now all of a sudden trumps in so everyone kind of knew crewmen was going to have to pivot that he was calling for big deficit spending all along but now the trumps in wanting to have big deficit spending and structure spending and tax cuts that would cause the deficit to blow up crewmen wouldn't be for it right and so when crewmen tried to explain why it would have been good if for Obama to have bigger deficits but now it's awful that Trump he gave two things and he said oh because the economy is recovered now quit rates are going up meaning you know more the percentage of people who have jobs then quit it for various reasons that's going up so that shows workers aren't worried about losing their job as much and they think they can get rehired and so we went through and just documented any column crewmen had written in 2016 before the election where crewmen had used the word deficit or I think borrowing was another one and just see the context and so he was all throughout for bigger deficits making fun of the deficit scolds and those people and we checked the numbers the quit rates and the rising wages that the same statistics he was they were like that you know all throughout 2016 as well so again these he had to crewmen knew he was going to be accused of inconsistency and so he grabbed two figures to try to explain why things were different now but those particular statistics had been the same all throughout and the last smoking gun was after the election November 14th 2016 because of time I won't read the quote to you but just go listen to that episode if you want 69 you'll see crewmen literally said that conditions right now are like they were in 2008 not as much as the economy still needs deficit spending and trumps plan is poorly designed you don't get as much bang for the buck but we could still use it right so again it's like crewmen versus crewmen at this point you know where you will get a real bang for the buck contra cruise correct we do have some listeners in the audience that's great alright yeah okay so we have to every episode we have to do this we have to have some awkward segue into our cruise can you believe Bob and I is that the most unlikely in the world to be hosting a cruise and yet people come to it they're as crazy as we are we put suntan lotion or bald spots so just don't worry and we have it's October 2017 this year contracruise.com it's a week of hilarity like okay so yeah we teach some stuff but then we do like we did family feud with libertarian questions which was fantastic we did with libertarian personalities and ideas yeah and but I mean just and then Bob sang and not just karaoke but sang with his band and this year we got special guest Scott Horton the great foreign policy expert we love is coming Michael Bolden of the 10th amendment center is going to be among our guests Jordan Page the musician who now lives in Washington state like you folks is going to be there it's going to be so if you have any if you're saying man the two people in the world I would most like to vacation with are Tom Woods and Bob Murphy then contracruise.com is your website alright there's a lot more we could say about these columns Bob but I believe that at this point they're going to start pulling the fire alarm on us so you want to just wrap her up now it's the awkward pause thanks for listening to Contra Krugman subscribe to the show for free on iTunes or Stitcher at ContraKrugman.com you'll also find detailed show notes pages our blog books by Tom and Bob and more at ContraKrugman.com see you next week