LAS VEGAS, Nevada — In two separate exclusive interviews ahead of his debate with liberal New York Times economist Paul Krugman on Friday, conservative economist Stephen Moore—now with the Heritage Foundation but previously of the Wall Street Journal—told Breitbart News he expects Krugman to defend “Obamanomics,” or a socialist kind of economic policy.
Moore is debating Krugman on Friday morning in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest. This debate represents a battle between Ronald Reagan-style conservative economic policy and Barack Obama-style liberal economic policy.
“For years and years and years, he’s kind of been the key economic voice at the New York Times, and for 10 years I was the economic correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for the editorial page so it’s sort of also Wall Street Journal versus New York Times,” Moore said when asked about his face-off with Krugman. “But the sort of real debate is over, the whole theme is socialism versus capitalism. I kind of feel sorry for Paul Krugman because there couldn’t be possibly a worse time for him to defend socialism when we see what’s happening in Greece and we see what’s happening in Puerto Rico and we see what’s happening in these South American countries. China has moved more toward socialism and their stock market is collapsing. So, I think it’s a pretty easy debate to say socialism is very like the Berlin wall coming down when Communism collapsed. It’s a system that only works until you run out of other people’s money and these countries are running out of other people’s money.”
Moore added that these liberal economic policies led to so many collapses worldwide.
“That’s what’s caused so many of these financial disasters around the world,” Moore said. “I’m really going to hit him on that and I’m also going to hit him on how he was one of the key architects of Obamanomics. Obamanomics has underperformed in every single regard. Obamanomics has not created the jobs, we’re 7 to 8 million jobs behind where we should be. Our GPD is about $2.5 trillion below where it should be if we had a Reagan-style expansion. Reagan’s expansion was based on capitalism and Obama’s expansion has been based on socialism.”
“I think it will be interesting to see how he responds to my charge that the people who have been hurt the most by Obama’s policies, which have really been outside of Krugman’s textbook, have been middle and low income people,” he continued. “The left always says how much they care about the poor and the poor have really been hurt by Obama’s policies. They don’t have the jobs, they don’t the good-paying jobs, they’re losing income, blacks, hispanics, young people and single women have always been the big losers under Obama.”
Listen to the full audio interview with this reporter and watch the full video with Breitbart’s Michelle Moons below.