Once President Ramp Waddler was comfortably installed in his sinecure, he and the congressional GOP revved up the legislative engine to implement its policy for all seasons, the measure that resolves every problem, addresses every issue, redresses every grievance, and virtually ensures the coming of the millennium, except that it has never once delivered on its promise when assessed empirically. It was time to cut some taxes. And, if it’s time to cut some taxes, it’s time to release the Laffer. Yes, voodoo economist – Poppy Bush’s characterization, not mine – Arthur Laffer hit the cable news bricks. The man is incorrigible. His imperviousness to contrary data, indeed to reality, amazes.
Peter Baker synopsized the Laffer saga well. My letter is largely anti-supply-side boilerplate; however, it does contain a small critique. Mr. Baker, had he more room to run, might have examined what was happening in states that were inflicting the Laffer orthodoxy on their citizens. He might also have looked at the states embracing the heretical path and raising taxes. The GOP loves the “fifty laboratories of the states,” except when it doesn’t, and this is one of those times.
Peter Baker, “A ’70s Economic Theory Comes to Life Once More,” The New York Times, 26 April 2017, A19 (www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/politics/white-house-economic-policy-arthur-laffer.html).
The evergreenness of Arthur Laffer’s supply-side theory is a marvel. Given more space, Peter Baker’s lucid assessment of supply-side economics as federal tax policy might have included a few words concerning its efficacy in the putative laboratories of the states.
Kansas’s shuttered classrooms, truncated school years, neglected infrastructure, exploding deficits, and flirtation with fiscal insolvency since Governor Sam Brownback – with Mr. Laffer as his guru – sharply reduced taxes in 2012 are well known. Perhaps more instructive is the counter-example of California’s robust economy since Governor Jerry Brown hiked taxes, also in 2012, an increase borne mainly by the wealthiest, those who routinely benefit most from Lafferian tax schemes.
And yet, despite no instance in which the theory has fulfilled its promise of fiscal neutrality – a balancing of lost tax revenues by economic growth and a broadened tax base – the idea persists. Perhaps it is evergreen like a weed.
Messrs. Trump, Ryan, and McConnell should remember that GOP control of the government grants them full ownership, for good or ill, of a Laffer-style tax giveaway.
The third installment of the David Brooks trilogy contains a truly epic distancing of movement conservatism from the world as it exists. In his editorial, Mr. Brooks offers a nearly perfect, indeed textbook, description of the corrosive impact of the neoliberal consensus on the country’s economic and social fabric. Somehow the cause of this socioeconomic carnage evaded his notice. He did not even, as a rhetorical ploy, mention neoliberalism or supply-side economics as a potential explanation so that he could dismiss it. He in fact offers no explanation aside, perhaps, from a vague, indefinable, hard-to-put-one’s-arms-around degradation of the spirit. Puh-leeze.
David Brooks, “This Century is Broken,” The New York Times, 21 February 2017, A23 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/this-century-is-broken.html).
David Brooks identifies the “bubble” imprisoning American elites and finds the wellspring of popular outrage in a cruelly unfair economy; however, he ultimately engages in victim-blaming. Thomas Piketty, Lewis Lapham, Robert Reich, et al., have better accounted for the country’s troubling socioeconomic plight and corrosive politics.
Longue durée analysis reveals that grave maldistribution of income historically undercuts social mobility because of the proclivity for a fortune to “age well,” for a wealthy family to maintain its position generationally not necessarily from superior business acumen but by dint of affluent birth.
Furthermore, a shifting conception of ideal entrepreneurial behavior has exacerbated America’s bend toward plutocracy. Once expected to balance the interests of shareholder, employee, and community, the businessman now favors the shareholder über alles, a formula for short-term thinking and callous expedience. The sad result is an economy generating stupendous wealth without prosperity while consigning the many to insecurity.
Rather than languid resignation to a Hobbesian future, Mr. Brooks might consider whether reshaping of socioeconomic regulation offers hope for a fairer, more inclusive economy despite the election of Mr. Trump, the self-aggrandizing plutocrat’s avatar, Lewis Lapham’s “prosperous fool and braggart moth.”
And then there was a second whiff with the Grey Lady.
I enjoy reading Paul Krugman’s columns. His consistent, reasoned, and informed assault on supply-side economics and his extolling of the virtues of rational deficit spending are valuable. There’s joy to be found in Mr. Krugman’s capacity to inflict agita on conservative economists; moreover, the clarity of his exposition is admirable.
This being said, his explanation for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loss to Queens’ Least Favorite Son was wide of the mark. Sensible people in late 2016 struggled to cope with the discombobulating event. Mr. Krugman unfortunately gravitated toward a simplistic explanation I had heard from others, that it all should be placed at the feet of Russian skullduggery and the media’s mishandling of the story. Mr. Krugman opted for proximate causation – the isolation of a single factor at the terminus of a lengthy string of causation – as the culprit rather than wading into the debacle’s complexities.
The elegant simplicity of a proximate explanation is appealing. It banishes from consideration the myriad of factors that undid Ms. Clinton’s campaign, namely the Mt. Everest of political baggage she and her husband have accumulated, the narrowing of her potential electorate by decades of right-wing demonization of her, her mediocre skills and flawed instincts as a candidate (she’s not her husband, whatever one may think of him), and her campaign’s strategic and tactical blunders.
The centering of a proximate explanation has perhaps another advantage: It leaves a weltanschauung intact, unquestioned, unexamined. The subtext of the election for me was the corrosive effects of the neoliberal consensus, four decades of misguided policies to which the Clintons had materially contributed.
Nonetheless, I still enjoy reading Paul Krugman’s columns. A second rebuff from the Grey Lady didn’t discourage me.
Paul Krugman, “Useful Idiots Galore,” The New York Times, 16 December 2016, A31 (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/useful-idiots-galore.html).
Paul Krugman accurately characterizes the GOP’s hypocritical silence in the face of Russian hacking and the media’s often uncritical handling of Russian cyber skullduggery and Ms. Clinton’s emails. He, however, has anointed himself chief apologist for a flawed candidate and an inept campaign. Before engaging in shotgun name-calling, he should ponder how, with a noxious, patently unqualified GOP opponent, the election was so close that hacks or media missteps mattered. Ms. Clinton wrested defeat from the jaws of victory.