Nobel Prize-winning economist: Trump’s economic policies are leading the U.S. to another Great Depression

President Donald Trump’s economic and trade policies are pushing the United States off a financial cliff and will lead to to a second Great Depression, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warns in a new op-ed published Tuesday by The New York Times.

Krugman begins by slamming the Trump trade war, which has already led to layoffs in the auto industry, the collapse of family farms, and huge losses in the stock market:

Trump says that “TARIFF is a beautiful word indeed,” but the actual history of U.S. tariffs isn’t pretty — and not just because tariffs, whatever the tweeter in chief says, are in practice taxes on Americans, not foreigners. In fact, it’s now a good bet that Trump’s tariffs will more than wipe out whatever breaks middle-class Americans got from the 2017 tax cut.

Trump’s tariffs could also help foster the rise of right-wing leaders around the world, something we saw after World War I, Krugman continues:

But there’s more. By deploying tariffs as a bludgeon against whatever he doesn’t like, Trump is returning America to the kind of irresponsibility it displayed after World War I — irresponsibility that, while obviously not the sole or even the main cause of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the eventual coming of World War II, helped create the environment for these disasters.

And while the Great Depression was a terrible disaster for the U.S., Krugman says the next one will be even worse:

So am I saying that Trump is repeating the policy errors America made a century ago? No. This time it’s much worse.

After all, while Warren Harding wasn’t a very good president, he didn’t routinely abrogate international agreements in a fit of pique. While America in the 1920s failed to help build international institutions, it didn’t do a Trump and actively try to undermine them. And while U.S. leaders between the wars may have turned a blind eye to the rise of racist dictatorships, they generally didn’t praise those dictatorships and compare them favorably to democratic regimes.

Tariffs are not “beautiful,” Krugman concludes, and they may well be what brings this country to its knees:

There are, however, enough parallels between U.S. tariff policy in the 1920s and Trumpism today for us to have a pretty good picture of what happens when politicians think that tariffs are “beautiful.” And it’s ugly.

Trump has to be removed from office, either through impeachment or at the ballot box in 2020. Sadly, neither of those may forestall the economic disaster that’s headed this way.

Featured Image Via PBS