In in his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Delusions of Chaos," Paul Krugman refutes Donald Trump's RNC claim that crime is running rampant throughout the US, although Krugman cannot provide the reason for this improvement. Paul writes:
"[A] funny thing happened: Crime plunged instead of continuing to rise. Other indicators also improved dramatically — for example, the teen birthrate has fallen 60 percent since 1991. Instead of societal collapse, we’ve seen what amounts to a mass outbreak of societal health. The truth is that we don’t know exactly why. Hypotheses range from the changing age distribution of the population to reduced lead poisoning; but in any case, the predicted apocalypse notably failed to arrive."
Well, allow me to help Paul regarding the decline in crime rates. As observed by John Donohue and Steven Levitt in the abstract of a National Bureau of Economic Research article entitled "Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime":
"We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime. "
Given this reduction in crime, Krugman would have us know of Trump supporters:
"America isn’t the country they remember from their youth, and in this case they’re right — it has gotten much better."
Much better, as evidenced by the nominations of Donald and Hillary? I don't think so.
And then there's America's national debt which has reached almost $20 trillion, or $162,000 per taxpayer. In fact, an economic apocalypse is well on its way.
