Paul Krugman is going bonkers.  Again.

After making a nutty statement about President Trump somehow cooking the books on job creation, he was forced to apologize for it, not because it was utterly invented out of whole cloth, the product of a fevered mind steeped in Trump Derangement Syndrome, but because it made him look stupid.

According to Fox News:

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman apologized Friday after he was roasted for floating a "conspiracy theory" that President Trump could have influenced the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The U.S. unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to 13.3 percent in May, down from a record high in April, indicating the nation's economy is recovering faster than expected from the coronavirus lockdown -- but Krugman didn't buy it.

"This being the Trump era, you can't completely discount the possibility that they've gotten to the BLS, but it's much more likely that the models used to produce these numbers — they aren't really raw data — have gone haywire in a time of pandemic," Krugman said.

Trump getting a handle on Deep State?  True only in the fevered imagination of a Trump-hater, based on the impeachment reports and the latest long battle over who leads the Voice of America, to take but two off-the-top examples.

Fact is, it's extremely difficult to fudge the data.  They're compiled from open sources from the states and each of those can be checked.  More important, it's compiled by oodles of bureaucrats in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  How that many people could get together and come up with a fake number is pretty improbable.

The Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney, was excoriated for raising questions about as much.  According to this Washington Post report:

It was the latest attack from a string of Republicans — including President Trump — who have said the monthly jobs reports were fake or unreliable, contradicting economists who say federal data on business in the United States is some of the most trustworthy in the world.

The agencies responsible for collecting that data observe strict rules designed to prevent politicians from cooking the books, and Erica Groshen, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics under President Obama, rejected the accusation. "If he is talking about actual interference with the process that ensures the integrity of the data, then he's mistaken," she said.

The thing is, Krugman is an economist.  He knows how these things work.  He knows that large groups of people, taking data from all the states, makes it extremely difficult to manipulate the books.

But he's so crazy, he just has to get that out there, to throw shade on one of the most stellar v-shaped recoveries of all time, to Get Trump.  He's so crazed that he's willing to come off as a nut to the knowledgeable, and say anything, just to Get Trump.  This is not a man of even moral temperament, or calm objective analysis.  This is a crazed lunatic, playing Mr. Respectable at the New York Times, the better to draw the nation's elites into his made-up narrative and get that nonsense out there. 

That said, it comes at the expense of his credibility as an economist, the only reason the elites listen to him at all.

The reality is, Krugman is terrified of President Trump's high jobs numbers.  He will now say anything to change the perception of their power and make the public think they are low. 

That's because of the effects of high job creation.  Want to know why President Trump has a 40% approval rate among black voters?  Try the jobs numbers.  And Democrats are terrified of those jobs numbers.  It's why Democrat governors in blue states during the coronavirus crisis were so determined to keep workers home.  If the jobs were fake, there would be no reason for Trump's approval numbers to soar among black voters, a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, as unprecedentedly as they have.  To extend that, it's why there would have been no attempt to foment racial warfare on the streets now over the single act of a dirty cop with 18 complaints on his record with no signficant punishment in a solid blue city.  These riots are all about blaming President Trump and killing the economy, same as the coronavirus fiasco was.

And Krugman is willing to say anything.  His words a vehicle for changing perceptions since he can't change facts.  What a wild-eyed loser.  It's getting more obvious every time he opens his mouth.

Caricature by DonkeyHotey,via Flickr.