title:  Paul Krugman, Top Economists: Bernie Sanders Is Engaging In ‘Fantasy Economics’
text: It can be said that Senator Bernie Sanders is one of the most sincere politicians in all of politics. He s ambitious with a gusto for progress that is really unmatched. However, this gusto for pushing forward an economic agenda that is unparalleled by everyone running against him has left several leading economists scratching their heads, including Paul Krugman.In Krugman s recent post in the New York Times he brings up a challenge to the economic thought of both Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman, who makes the claim that the Vermont Senator s economic plan would make jobs and income soar. Friedman states that real economic growth under Sanders would grow to 5.3% per year. That s as opposed to where we are now, which is at around 2%.Krugman writes: OK, progressives have, rightly, mocked Jeb Bush for claiming that he could double growth to 4 percent. Now people close to Sanders say 5.3??? Even those of us who believe that there s still significant slack in the US labor market are aware that much, probably most, of the decline in labor force participation since 1999 reflects an aging population   prime-working-age LFPR has reclaimed most of the lost ground since the Great Recession, and there s probably a long-term downward trend even there. It s possible that we can get unemployment down under 4 percent, but that s way below any estimates I ve seen of the level of unemployment consistent with moderate inflation. Krugman goes so far as to even say that if this sort of line was being perpetuated by a Republican, it would be described as  deep voodoo.  He continued, saying: Sanders needs to disassociate himself from this kind of fantasy economics right now. And  he concluded by stating that if his campaign disagrees with this assessment, which is backed up by fellow leading economic advisers, we ll be looking at a Trump presidency for sure.In a letter to Sanders and Friedman from  former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton  Alan Krueger, Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, and Laura D Andrea Tyson, they state that they  have worked to make the Democratic Party the party of evidence-based economic policy.  Continuing, they wrote: We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders s economic plan claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence. Friedman asserts that your plan will have huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.As much as we wish it were so, no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes. Making such promises runs against our party s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic. These claims undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda and make it that much more difficult to challenge the unrealistic claims made by Republican candidates. With Goolsbee even going so far as to separately also say,  they ve evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars  when he was commenting on another summation of Sanders  proposals by another progressive analyst.It seems pretty harsh, but it also seems they clearly to want to get their point across.Featured image from Flickr