Less than a year after unveiling its AI avatars that convey human emotions using user text inputs, Nvidia-backed AI startup Synthesia announced on Wednesday that it has secured $180 million in a Series D funding round to advance its AI-powered […]

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• Donald Trump champions the working class but his policies are bad news for them, Paul Krugman says.
• The Nobel-winning economist says tariffs and deportations will hurt instead of help the poor.
• "A lot of people are going to get brutally scammed," Krugman said.

Donald Trump rode to victory in the US presidential race by pledging to put America first and fight for blue-collar workers. Paul Krugman says he'll only make their lives harder.

The economist, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008, criticized the president-elect's plans to raise tariffs and cut taxes during Tuesday's episode of "The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent" podcast.

He told The New Republic show that those and other policies would lead to the working class paying higher prices while high earners keep more of their money.

"Even more than usual for a Republican, he appears to have an extremely regressive economic program in mind, one that really will effectively redistribute income away from working-class voters to the top," Krugman said.

American households are already being pinched by inflation, which spiked to a 40-year high of more than 9% in the summer of 2022 and remains above the Federal Reserve's 2% target.

On top of higher prices for food, fuel, rent, and other basics, many consumers are also paying more toward their credit cards, car loans, and mortgages.

That's because the Fed, in a bid to curb inflation, increased its benchmark rate from zero to north of 5.25% in under 17 months, and has kept it as high as 4.5% for now.

The battle over groceries

Krugman, a former MIT and Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist, zeroed in on grocery prices. Trump said during his campaign that he would reduce them, but he's walked that claim back in recent weeks.

Yet recent surveys show that his supporters still expect him to do so, Krugman said, despite the fact that broader prices are still rising and deflation is almost universally regarded as undesirable for an economy.

A CBS News/YouGov survey, conducted in late December with a nationally representative group of 2,244 US adults, found that 40% of Americans expect Trump to make food and grocery prices go down, exceeding the 36% who expect him to make them increase.

"A lot of people are going to get brutally scammed," Krugman said. Trump isn't just misleading people by saying they'll be better off once he's in office, he also doesn't appear to know how he'll deliver on his promises, Krugman continued. "So the scam is there is no plan."

Trump said last year that lowering grocery prices would be tricky, but improving supply chains and boosting domestic energy production could lower costs for farmers, who could then pass those savings onto consumers.

Tariffs and immigration

Separately, Krugman nodded to the fact that tariffs are a tax on imports, and businesses usually pass on their increased costs by charging higher prices to consumers.

He described their impact as "really bad," and said the fallout from Trump's proposed mass deportations would be "much, much worse." They'd be hugely disruptive and drive up prices in industries like agriculture, food processing, and construction, Krugman said, leaving the US with a shortage of workers for large-scale programs like rebuilding Florida after a hurricane.

The author and blogger also rang the alarm on Trump and his allies' fierce criticism of colleges and skepticism of higher education.

"We've been pulling ahead on technology, but an administration that's extremely hostile to universities and education is going to undermine that source of advantage as well," Krugman said.

"Trump wants to turn the clock back to 1896, and that's not good for the US economy."

• A Stanford law professor dropped Meta as a client in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg's recent changes.
• Mark Lemley represented Meta in a 2023 AI copyright case involving comedian Sarah Silverman and others.
• Zuckerberg's recent changes at Meta more closely align with Elon Musk's opinions and strategies.

Mark Lemley, a Stanford law professor and lawyer who represented Meta in a 2023 AI copyright case, says he has dropped the company as a client because of what he described as CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness."

"I have fired Meta as a client. While I think they are on the right side in the generative AI copyright dispute in which I represented them, and I hope they win, I cannot in good conscience serve as their lawyer any longer," Lemley, a partner at the law firm Lex Lumina, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday.

Lemley and Lex Lumina represented Meta when comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors sued the Facebook owner in 2023, saying it violated copyright by training the Llama AI model on books they had written.

At the time, Meta's lawyers argued the claims should fail because the authors could not prove Llama generated text that closely resembled their books. The case is ongoing.

In the LinkedIn post, Lemley also said he was changing how he used some Meta products.

He has deactivated his Threads account as he did not want to "support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe."

The lawyer also said he will no longer buy anything from ads he encounters on Facebook or Instagram.

"While I have thought about quitting Facebook, I find great value in the connections and friends I have here," Lemley wrote.

Lemley is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. At Lex Lumina, he works with clients on cases pertaining to intellectual property, antitrust, and internet law.

Lemley, Lex Lumina, Sarah Silverman and Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Changes at Meta

Since the start of the year, Zuckerberg has made sweeping changes to Meta. They include eliminating third-party fact-checking on the platform in the US in favor of community notes.

Meta also planned to reduce diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Zuckerberg recently said Meta needs more "masculine energy."

"Masculine energy, I think, is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it," he told the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast.

Zuckerberg's changes at Meta resemble those made by Tesla and X owner Elon Musk.

Musk has spoken out against DEI and content moderation. Politically, Musk has thrown his support behind right-leaning political parties and figures in Europe and the US.

He's a prominent supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, and is joined lead of a commission called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

In politics and relationship-building with Trump, too, Zuckerberg's actions are starting to mirror Musk's. Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. Zuckerberg also declined to endorse any candidate during the 2024 election campaign.

These moves mark a distinct change in how Zuckerberg approaches Trump.

In 2020, after Facebook was criticized over the then-president's violent remarks on the platform, Zuckerberg said he was "deeply shaken and disgusted by President Trump's divisive and incendiary rhetoric."

Trump was barred from Facebook and Instagram in 2021 for what Meta called praising "people engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6." Meta reversed the decision two years later.

Apple recently made a donation to assist with LA wildfire recovery efforts, and is now inviting customers to do the same.

Those based in the US can make a donation to the American Red Cross’s Southern California Wildfires Relief fund though the App Store or Apple Music apps …

Several Meta properties including Facebook are reportedly down for users within the last few minutes. Downdetector shows a spike of more than 10,000 reports and climbing for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.