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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone, and good Good Friday morning, everyone. In fact, we will talk later in the show, we'll do a call in about how people who are observing Christians, Jews, and Muslims right now are all giving up kind of some food. We'll have a calling on why you do that no matter which religious tradition you come from. We'll talk about those gifted and talented programs that Mayor de Blasio was abolishing, they're back under Mayor Eric Adams.

We'll take calls from teachers and parents and anyone else coming up. We'll talk about in our climate story of the week, which will come up at about eleven o'clock, the deforestation of the Amazon. That's nothing new, but I saw a stat on Reuters the other day that said, it's happening so fast now and it doesn't make the news because it's not new. It's happening so fast. It makes the news I saw it on Reuters, [chuckles] but it doesn't make big news around the world.

You probably haven't heard this stat, but it's happening so fast now that an area the size of New York City was deforested in the Brazilian Amazon, just in the first three months of this year. We'll talk about all those things as the show goes on today. Our topic number one, however, is political priority number one in this midterm election year, in most recent opinion polls, and that is inflation.

The new inflation number out last week showed consumer prices jumped by more than 8% compared to March of last year, that's the biggest year to year increase for any month, in about 40 years. That's on top of prices rising almost that fast in the several months before, as all of you probably know.

This is hitting people hard, and it's regressive in that wealthier people can absorb the price increases, and not give up important things, more than less wealthy people, obviously. It's politically daunting for the Democrats because they're the party in power. Many people will tend to blame or credit them for whatever's going on. Here's Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, trying to make political hay out of that on YouTube recently.

Marco Rubio: Inflation is out of control. People know it. Even if you got a raise, it got wiped out by inflation. If you have a small business, you have to raise prices, that means you're losing customers, it threatens to wipe you out. That's what's happening in the real world. Remember, Joe Biden said we didn't have inflation.

Then he said this was transitory and it was going to pass and now it continues to linger, it continues to hurt people, and they don't do anything about it. Instead, they want to focus on all kinds of radical left-wing crazy woke stuff they want to fight over. They cause the inflation and they're ignoring it.

Brian Lehrer: Senator Marco Rubio with his spin. The Democrats, of course, do not actually say they've caused inflation or are ignoring it. Here's President Biden speaking on Tuesday.

Joe Biden: I'm doing everything within my power by executive orders to bring down the price and address the Putin price hike. In fact, we've already made progress since March inflation data was collected. Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away.

Brian Lehrer: He called it the Putin price hike. Let's drill down and see what's really going on, and what different policies against inflation Democrats and Republicans are really for, and some of the pros and cons of each. With me now is New York Times columnist, CUNY economics professor, and Nobel Prize in Economics winner, Paul Krugman, who wrote a column the other day called, Inflation Is About to come down- but Don't Get Too Excited. Dr. Krugman, we are always excited to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Paul Krugman: Good to be on again.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're inviting your questions and your input. Where are you feeling inflation most in your lives? Who do you blame for it if anyone? What policies do you want to see to tamp it down? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or any questions you've always wanted to ask Paul Krugman, but you never audited his class. 212-433-9692 or tweet @brianlehrer.

Dr. Krugman, let's start with the good news. You wrote the consumer price index at 8.5% inflation. That number is based probably on missing a downward turn that began in late March. Can you describe that downward turn as you see it and why you think it's happening?

Paul Krugman: Yes. There are a couple of components. One is that fully half of the inflation in March was gasoline prices, and gas prices, they've come down a bit since mid-March. The official number is really more or less is the average price over the course of a month. The fact that prices have been coming down since sometime in March is not showing up yet in the official data.

The other things that have been contributing to inflation, things like disruption of supply chains, and high shipping costs are also-- Now, all of these things are still very high by historical standards, but all trending down. Just about every private forecaster that I follow thinks that we are going to be seeing inflation coming down, that we can probably have hit the peak, at least in terms of the annual inflation rate that we are already looking in the rearview mirror at these numbers.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote about something called the bullwhip effect and why it's causing oversupply now in many industries, which should bring down prices. You want to find the bullwhip effect for our listeners?

Paul Krugman: I think it's like Indiana Jones flicks his wrist and the tip of his whip moves much faster than his wrist does. When there is a shortage, particularly this is true for things like shipping supply chains for trucking, when there's shortage people rush to buy for fear that they may not be able to get it, retailers stock up to try and meet that demand, wholesale distributors stock up, even more, to be able to serve as the retailers. There's this surge of demand for stuff. Suddenly, there are no containers to be had for shipping things.

At a certain point, people find that they've overshopped that there are inventories-- Inventories at retailers are pretty high right now. They're actually above normal levels. People are not actually short of toilet paper at this point. Then all goes into reverse. Consumers who have actually bought about as much stuff as their house can hold, scale back, the retailers then scale back their orders, and all works its way back down the chain.

Even as we're talking about the high cost of trucking, people in the trucking industry are warning that there's a trucking recession developing. All of those things, we're about to see the flip side. Just as some of the inflation on the way up was a result of overreaction, some of the disinflation is probably going to be exaggerated because the bullwhip has now slicked back.

Brian Lehrer: The rest of your headline, and your column says, but don't get too excited, so what's the don't get too excited part?

Paul Krugman: I hate to say this, being I'm very much a full employment guy. It does look like the US economy is overheated. There do appear to be more job openings than we can actually fill. We want wages rising fast. At the moment, wages seem to be rising at something like a 6% annual rate. Even with productivity growth, and even with some rise in the labor share of income, that still is consistent with an inflation rate of more like 4% than the 2% that we've come to accept as normal.

Even once this transitory stuff, the gas prices, the supply chain snarls, even once those things go away, we're still going to be left with uncomfortably high inflation unless the economy gets a little softer. It doesn't have to mean a recession, but it probably does have to mean that the unemployment rate goes up a bit and that we're just in this seller's market for labor. That's a good thing, but it's at the moment too much of a good thing.

Brian Lehrer: Some people may be surprised or disappointed that you Paul Krugman are not laying out what they might consider a more progressive view that full unemployment, and especially rising wages after what 50 years of stagnation wouldn't be a high high high priority.

Paul Krugman: The problem is, there's a risk here. It's possible that I'm being overcautious, but what we really don't want to see and are not yet seeing is a situation like what we had at the end of the 1970s when inflation was really entrenched in the economy. When it was

incredibly expensive to get it back down. You don't want a situation in which wages are-- wages rising because there's lots of demand for workers is great.

Wage is rising because everybody expects inflation all across the board. That's just self-perpetuating inflation. That's not a good thing. We want to cool things down. Not a lot. We want to cool things down before we get into that position. We don't want-- 2022 is not 1980. We don't want 2023, 2024 to look like 1980.

Brian Lehrer: I will take some push back on that for you from a caller. Marvin in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Paul Krugman. Hi, Marvin.

Marvin: Hi. Thanks again, Brian and your staff for your wonderful work. Paul, I'm shocked that you're-- again, when workers haven't gotten raises in a generation and most of the wage increases are going to the lowest-paid workers that you would pick that. Why aren't you talking more about the incredible profits that companies have been making especially since the epidemic? They could be giving up on profits instead of raising prices.

Brian Lehrer: Marvin, I'm going to leave it there. You framed the question well. We have another caller too. I'll just paraphrase him and not put him on the air as well, who says, and we have a lot of listeners who believe this, I'm sure. Companies are taking advantage of these hikes to gouge more than what their costs are going up. What do you say to either of those things?

Paul Krugman: I am actually, in terms of being sympathetic to that argument, I must be in 98th percentile of professional economists. I actually do think there is some price gouging going on. I do think that there's a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that says that companies that might have been unwilling to fully exploit their monopoly power for fear of a political or customer backlash are using an inflationary background as cover to go ahead and do that, but there's no way, looking at the numbers, that that can account for more than a small fraction of the inflation.

There's also not that much that the Biden administration can do. You can't make-- I think they should be doing much more to highlight price gouging. I think that they're getting bad advice from their economists who are basically saying, "Don't talk about that. It'll sound too radical." I don't think that you can make that the centerpiece of an anti-inflation strategy. It's just that in a situation where there are-- I believe it's something like there are a 100 job openings for every 70 workers seeking jobs.

Cracking down on price gouging is, first of all, they're not quite clear what the policy tools are and secondly, it just isn't going to be enough. I want to take it easy. I don't want the Fed to slam on the brakes and throw us into a deep recession, so as to eliminate the evil of inflation, but I do think we do need some cooling off along with whatever else we can do.

Brian Lehrer: Paul Krugman with us on the politics, the policy, and the economics of inflation. 212-433-WNYC. Now, let's get to the blame parts of this. Republicans blame Democrats. You heard the Marco Rubio clip. Democrats blame the two P's, Putin and the pandemic. We'll get to the policy parts, but first, in fairness, this was a big issue before we started the new embargoes on Russia. Right?

Paul Krugman: Yes. You had the pandemic that shut down a large part of the world economy and then as stuff started to reopen, it did so in a very, very skewed way. There was a period there when people were afraid to go out to restaurants, when people were afraid to go to gyms, and so they bought other stuff instead. All of that was bound to have a lot of disruptive and inflationary effect regardless.

A lot of people in the administration, I think quite rightly, are comparing it to the situation in 1946 when there was in fact, as the economy was rather awkwardly transitioning back to a peacetime economy, there were a lot of disruptions and in fact inflation running at rates like what we're seeing now. That's a big deal.

Of course, oil prices are up a lot from their pandemic lows because the world economy is recovering and people are using more oil. A lot of this is the global environment. Then, of course, there's the Putin shock on top of that. It is worth remembering that inflation is-- it's higher in the US than in most other advanced economies, but not by a lot. The euro area inflation over the past year was 7.5%. Ours was 8.5.

Brian Lehrer: Are they doing stimulus like the United States?

Paul Krugman: Not on remotely the same scale. By the way, that stimulus, the Biden spending, that was a year ago. How long do you keep on blaming everything on policies that are rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror? We've run our economy hotter than the rest of the world, which has its good side as well as its bad. We're having slightly higher inflation, but by any reckoning, I can do, at least 80% of the inflation we're seeing is global forces that have nothing whatsoever to do with US policy.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting because another thing that Republicans blame, well, we've touched on it, is too much stimulus in the economy like the last big round of money that got pumped into the economy in various ways once Biden was in office, even though pandemic unemployment was already going down. Child tax credit, policies of the Fed, other things, stimulus checks per se. You're saying that's maybe 10% of the inflation, something like that.

Paul Krugman: Maybe. Possibly even less than that. That was not a stimulus bill. It was a economic relief bill. A lot of it was about reducing child poverty. A lot of the money actually so far hasn't even been spent. A lot of it was aid to state and local governments, which is very gradually showing up in their budgets, but it's not really pushing the economy. It certainly was not-- if you just take the raw number and say, "Look at all of that money. Surely that must be responsible for inflation."

It doesn't actually parse out once we start to look at the details. If we could do it over again, I think that we could have done with less state and local aid. Unfortunately, the least justifiable piece of the thing, which was the $1,400 checks, was also the most popular thing in it. I think at some point you need to stop blaming everything on that spending bill from early 2021 and start talking about, first of all, most important is, at least in terms of economic policy, it's not who's to blame, but what do we do now.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to what do we do now. Let me take a call from Leslie in Hicksville first. Leslie, you're on WNYC with Paul Krugman. Hi.

Leslie: Hi. How are you doing? I listen to you every day and you're really good.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Go ahead.

Leslie: 100 jobs for every 70 people who want them, okay, I have a job, but I don't make any money and I can't afford to do anything with that salary. The quality of the job has to do with what's available and what people can live on. Just because the job is there-- do you want fries with that jobs? Are you talking about jobs that are not capable of supporting the people who have them with people having to do one more job?

Brian Lehrer: Right. Leslie, thank you very much. Dr. Krugman, he was citing your stat back to you. You said there are 100 job openings for every 70 people looking for work. In other words, there's a labor shortage, but at least for Leslie, he doesn't feel wages going up to livable.

Paul Krugman: Well, of course, that's the Putin shock. The rise in the price of food and fuel is taking away a lot of the wage gains, but also look, yes, wages need to rise in America. I'm all in favor of things that enhance the bargaining power of workers. You have Staten Island. I never expected to see Staten Island as the possible harbinger for a better future, but it really is. That Amazon vote is a potentially very, very big deal. The thing is

you can't just do it just running the economy hot is not a sustainable way to get the kind of wage increases we need. We need institutional change, we need unionization, we need a higher minimum wage. At this point, what we're getting is, it's a good market for labor, but the inflation is taking away a good part of the gains. You have to ask yourself, again, what do you do--?

Brian Lehrer: Hold that thought right there, because we need to get in a break somewhere. We might as well do it here, and then we will come back with Paul Krugman and turn the page, specifically to what do we do about inflation? What are the Republicans proposing, what did the Democrats propose, what does Paul Krugman propose, and more of your calls? We also are going to get more into his view on the Amazon Warehouse, Labor Organization, Union Organization on Staten Island and the larger implications of that, too. Stay tuned, Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist talking mostly about his column from a few days ago called Inflation Is About To Come Down- But Don't Get Too Excited. All right, let's talk about solutions. In the Marco Rubio clip we played he said, "Democrats aren't doing anything about inflation because they'd rather focus on woke social issues".

Never mind, Dr. Krugman that Republicans are delighting and focusing on unwanted social issues like banning abortion everywhere and prosecuting parents who support their transgender children. That's a lot of what we'll be hearing in these midterm elections, but what are the Democrats doing about inflation since they're in power? Then we'll get into what the Republicans are proposing to do about it if they get into power.

Paul Krugman: Mostly what the Democrats are doing is getting out of the way of the Federal Reserve. This is mostly at this point an issue of policy. The Fed is this peculiar institution, which is part of the government but not exactly part of the government, has a lot of autonomy. It's pretty much up to the Fed to cool things down to the point where we get back to an acceptable rate of inflation. The Biden administration is not leaning, Trump was constantly jawboning the Fed, demanding the cut interest rates, whatever and the Biden ministration is letting the Fed do its job.

There are other things you can do but are pretty much at the margin. I think you should be doing a little bit of jawboning of companies that are doing excessive price increases, but that's going to be very much something that's at the margin. You can try to do things, to encourage supply chains to get unraveled, step in where there appeared to be dysfunctional local port agencies that are not keeping things moving, but mostly this is just about let Jay Powell and Lael Brainard at the Fed, do what the Fed is supposed to do, which is its mandate is to full employment plus price stability, and we've got the full employment they now need to work on the price stability.

Brian Lehrer: Can you explain how that works with respect to interest rates, unemployment, and inflation? I think most of our listeners know the Fed is now starting to hike interest rates faster, to make it harder for companies to borrow, which slows growth. How does that result in lower prices?

Paul Krugman: The Fed literally controls the rate at which banks lend money to each other overnight, which doesn't matter for anything in the real world, but because the interest rates that do matter, which is mostly mortgage rates and corporate borrowing rates. Those interest rates reflect expectations about what the future of the federal funds rate is going to be.

The Fed has made it clear, they've done one small hike and the Fed funds rate are more important, they've made it clear they intend to keep on doing that until inflation comes down. That's already been reflected in a large increase in these relevant interest rates, mortgage rates are back up to pretty much pre-pandemic levels, so are corporate borrow going rates.

What that does is it reduces spending. It's going to mean less construction, to some extent, less business investment, which means that there's going to be less demand, less overall spending in the economy that will translate into somewhat weaker consumer demand, all of which reduces the pressure.

The US economy was growing like gangbusters last year. It's probably huge [unintelligible 00:25:30] but it's probably going to be growing more like 1% rate looking forward, which is a bit less than the economy's capacity with the [unintelligible 00:25:45] probably grow something like 2% annual rate. We're talking about an economy that is basically the RPMs on your car engines are going to be dropping from 4,000 to 3,000. That we hope leads to some of these price increases starting to end, not to a sudden crashing halt to inflation, but to a gradual decline.

Brian Lehrer: The Republicans are against the, Build Back Better bill, which the Democrats still could get some version of through, if they get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on board, that's supposed to be a lot of social spending toward childcare and eldercare and against climate change. Do you have a view on how inflationary that would be at any size?

Paul Krugman: Yes, they basically zilch. Build Back Better, first of all, every version has been more or less paid for with additional revenue, so it's not deficit spending. Secondly, it's a long-term program. We're talking about, you can take a look at a number less than a trillion dollars, I don't know what it will be. That may sound like a lot of money, but that's a decade of spending in a $24 trillion economy. It could make a pretty big difference, actually, in reducing inflation over the longer term, because we would be improving our transportation network, our infrastructure.

In terms of the actual demand impact, Build Back Better, it's rounding error on any of this stuff. One of the really unfortunate things about the way the narrative has developed is that people say, "Oh, you spent $2 trillion and that caused inflation, how can you propose spending another trillion dollars," but spending two trillion in one year, versus spending one trillion over 10 years are just not comparable actions.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a caller with a suggestion to help tamp down inflation and even out the labor market. Lou on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lou. I don't think we've ever said Staten Island so much in one segment with Paul Krugman. Hi Lou.

Lou: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I just want to put the rise of inflation on the Republicans, on the past administration reaction to the pandemic. Had they taken it seriously, if they had known what was coming and taken it seriously, they would have put measures into place to stop it in the first place, because this pandemic hit the entire global supply chain.

Everything that in this country comes from some places, once a pandemic hit and they reacted to it so incompetently [unintelligible 00:28:41] to drink tea in the morning, spray ourselves with with Cholorox in the afternoon, if they had dealt with it positively, we wouldn't be in a problem [unintelligible 00:28:50] they restricted immigration, almost stop it. Usually in this economy, people coming from other countries are so desperate to start over, they would filled these positions.

The job that the [unintelligible 00:29:05] is too dangerous for them or they were just too low, these people would have taken a serious position and the supply chain would now continue. I think they are the cause. The Biden administration is doing a pretty good job dealing with it. They are handling it the best they can, and I think they are managing it well, but they are the cause of it. The problem was theirs, they did not [unintelligible 00:29:25] the problem, they had no solution to it, the leadership was totally incompetent. They can't go around blaming the Democrats now for inflation, they are the cause of inflation.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call. Dr. Krugman, let's take the immigration piece of that. The border southern border is a rising issue for Biden, a lot of people coming across. It's in the top two or three things that they're doing on Fox News right now during the day, but it's real. There are a lot more

people coming across the border than US policy even under Biden wants there to be, but immigration, at least mathematically, is one solution to a labor shortage. How do you see that?

Paul Krugman: Really, it's important to understand that no matter how much Fox News may be hyperventilating about people coming across the border, the overwhelming fact about US immigration over these past five years is that it's way, way down. We've had far fewer immigrants coming to this country, legally or otherwise, than we used to, and that actually is a significant factor.

When I talk about labor shortages, one of the puzzles is overall employment is still not back fully to pre-pandemic levels. How can it be that we have labor shortages given that? One really important factor is that we have just not had anything like the number of working-age eager-to-work immigrants that we used to be getting.

A combination of the pandemic but also a hostile environment has really cut back a really critical part of the US labor force. If you wanted to be able to keep us growing without inflationary risks, getting us back to bringing the world's most motivated ambitious people to America to work with would be a big contributing factor. Of course, that's going to go over great on Fox News, but the reduction in immigration is a significant part of what's our problem.

Brian Lehrer: There used to be a union-based argument against large-scale immigration because if there are fewer workers, especially for the relatively crappy jobs, then the wages will get pushed up for those jobs by supply and demand, and then the people who are here won't be stuck in this middle-class working-class decline that we've been in for 50 years. The union stopped making that argument. What happened? How do you understand that?

Paul Krugman: I'm not sure exactly what's going on in the union thinking on this except that I think there were a fair number of immigrant workers in the unions themselves, but also, what I do know is the academic research which actually does now a lot of evidence that the immigrants that actually come to the United States, by and large, do not compete head-to-head with workers already here, that they tend to take the jobs that Americans are unwilling to take.

You get two guys with comparable levels of education, one born here, one born somewhere else. They both have important skills, but not the same skills, and they don't go into the same kinds of jobs. If you use the jargon, it looks as if immigrants and native workers are complements, not substitutes. The idea that immigration drives down real wages, it's something that isn't a crazy argument but does not appear to be true in practice.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a proposal to limit inflation from the listener via Twitter. The listener writes, "How would canceling student debt impact inflation?" For a little context, on yesterday's show, one of our segments was about how canceling student debt, according to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, may be the number one progressive economic priority right now. Senator Elizabeth Warren, we played a clip of her putting this high, high, high on her economic progressive list. How do you see canceling student debt, and does it have an impact on inflation? Would it have?

Paul Krugman: If I had to list the things that I think are more important, I would have said that restoring that child tax credit was the most important thing, but of course, that basically requires Joe Manchin's vote, so that's not right at the top of our list. There's a lot that Biden can do just through executive action on student debt which would help a lot of people. In terms of inflation, it's just separate stories. Canceling student debt would help a lot of people. It would do very little, I think, one way or the other to the inflation rate.

Brian Lehrer: As we start to run out of time, does it come down to-- Democrats are leaving it to the Fed, and Republicans want to lower taxes. They always want to lower taxes, but we see it right now in the pressure to suspend gasoline taxes, primarily to give a few cents off the gallon on that. That's kind of it on the two sides, or what am I missing?

Paul Krugman: I think you're giving Republicans too much credit. They aren't even really being consistent on that. The Republican plan for dealing with inflation is basically to blame the Democrats, and the Democratic plan, at this point, given the available [unintelligible 00:35:36] is mostly to leave it up to the Federal Reserve which, by the way, I do believe will work and so to financial markets, even consumer expectations.

People expect a lot of inflation over the next year, but not if you look at three-year, five-year inflation expectations. They're actually pretty stable. People do think that we're going to get this thing under control. There's a huge political question whether inflation will come down enough to help the headwinds against Democrats in the midterm elections, but I actually don't think that this thing is out of control.

I think that we may well look back at how we handled the whole economic fallout from the pandemic and said, "Hey, we restored full employment very fast. We had a burst of inflation, but it was temporary." From the perspective of 2027 or something, we may look back and say, "Gosh, that was a pretty good example of economic management."

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Well, let's hope. I guess the Democrats are hoping people can start seeing in their own lives a reason to say that before November. Republicans hope it'll happen right after they take Congress. [chuckles]

Paul Krugman: Yes, exactly.

Brian Lehrer: One more thing before we go, last thing, because I said I would get back to the Amazon warehouse unionization vote, and you wrote a column about that the other day. My question is big picture because many unionization efforts at other Amazon locations and in other industries are still getting voted down. I think, overall, private-sector unionization is continuing its 50-year decline. How do you see the big picture?

Paul Krugman: What it's going to take is a lot of mobilization. It's going to take political forces that are really pro-union. It was interesting that there was a long delay before prominent Democrats celebrated that union victory on Staten Island, but they did eventually. If we could come back to something like the environment we had when America's union movement really became powerful, which was that basically, the Democratic Party was strongly pro-union, then you might be amazed at what could happen because companies like Amazon are perfect targets for unionization.

Brian Lehrer: You mean it'll take a new set of laws or policies?

Paul Krugman: Not even necessarily laws, but actually how you enforce the laws. A lot of the de-unionization of America came because, during the Reagan era, the National Labor Relations Board fundamentally did not want to do its job. If we can get back to a government that is even willing to enforce existing labor laws, that could make a big difference.

Brian Lehrer: Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, CUNY economics professor, Nobel Prize, and economics winner. We've been talking mostly about his column from the other day called Inflation Is About to come down- but Don't Get Too Excited. Dr. Krugman, we always appreciate it. Thank you very, very much.

Paul Krugman: Thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Coming up next, the return of the gifted and talented programs for lower grades in New York City that Mayor de Blasio was trying to make go away. Stay with us.

 

 

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