“Behold, The ‘Laffering Laughing’ Stock”: The Remarkable Persistence Of Crackpot Economics In The GOP
The most horrifying article you can read today is not about Ayatollah Khamenei’s troubling comments on the Iran nuclear deal, it’s this piece from Jim Tankersley of The Washington Post about how all the GOP presidential candidates are lining up to receive the wisdom of Arthur Laffer as they formulate their economic plans. This is the rough equivalent of doctors seeking to lead the American College of Pediatricians competing to see which one can win the favor of Jenny McCarthy. Behold:
As the 2016 GOP primary season takes off, Laffer is more in demand than ever before, with Republican candidates embracing tax-cut-for-the-rich policies even as they bemoan economic inequality. Candidates have been meeting with him in recent weeks, and on Friday in Nashville, he says, his schedule includes Rick Perry at 10 a.m., Ben Carson at noon, Jeb Bush at 1:15 p.m. and Bobby Jindal at 5. Dinner is scheduled with Ted Cruz. He has already met at least once with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. …
Some time ago, Laffer recounted, he sat down with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who was hoping the economist would bless his flat-tax plan. Laffer critiqued it instead as having too many complicated, economy-distorting features. He recalled Paul expressing disappointment he couldn’t endorse it.
After that sit-down, Paul’s advisers kept calling Laffer, he said. When Paul announced his presidential run this week, he touted a tax plan far more in line with Laffer’s vision.
Laffer’s theory is that cutting taxes for the wealthy not only brings an explosion of economic growth but pays for itself; give millionaires and billionaires a break, and the resulting economic activity will be so spectacular that more revenue will come in despite the lower rates. Laffer reduced this idea to the famous “Laffer curve,” which he supposedly sketched on a napkin in 1974 and thereby seduced generations of Republican politicians. It took the perfectly sensible idea that if all income was taxed at 100 percent then no one would have any incentive to work, and turned that into a claim that virtually any reduction in the top rate will increase revenues—and the converse as well, that increasing the top rate will always reduce revenues and stifle growth.
If that were true, then the Clinton years would have been a period of dismal economic doldrums, followed by the glorious George W. Bush boom. In fact, Laffer’s theory has been as thoroughly disproven as phrenology or the notion that the stars are pinholes in the blanket Zeus laid across the sky; Republican economist Greg Mankiw famously referred to those who believe Laffer as “charlatans and cranks.” But in a world where Mike Huckabee convinces people that the Bible contains a secret cancer cure and baseball players wear titanium necklaces in the belief that doing so will align their humours or some such nonsense, there will always be a market for crackpottery, particularly the kind that offers a justification for the thing you already want to do.
And this is why Republicans continue to seek Arthur Laffer’s wisdom and repeat the completely, thoroughly, 100 percent false claim that cutting taxes for the wealthy will always increase revenue. They want those tax cuts for ideological and moral reasons, and when someone with a claim to expertise tells them that not only is there no cost but that such cuts will actually help the little people too, well that’s just too seductive for words. When the world shows them that cutting taxes on the wealthy actually reduces revenue, it doesn’t make them revise their belief that doing so is right and just, because that belief isn’t subject to the test of evidence.
Candidates get a lot of flack for having advisers or supporters who have committed various sins, even if there was no reasonable way the candidate could have been expected to know about or approve those sins, and they won’t have any impact on what the candidate would do if elected. We’ll spend days hounding a candidate because some consultant he hired sent out some offensive tweets five years ago, or because someone who endorsed him said something outrageous at a rally. But here we have a case in which candidates are voluntarily and knowingly asking for the advice and approval of one of America’s foremost economic quacks, specifically for the purposes of formulating policy that would affect every American’s life. Is anybody going to ask them what the hell they’re doing?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 10, 2015
“Squirt Gun Rambo’s”: When Fake Guns Are Banned And Real Guns Are Protected
Three years ago, Tampa was getting ready to host the Republican National Convention, and local officials took a variety of steps to improve public safety for those attending the event. Among the items prohibited in the area outside the convention center? Water guns – but not real guns. The former was deemed a possible threat to public safety, while the latter was protected by state law.
A similar issue came up recently in Tennessee.
The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill Monday night that makes it illegal to take a squirt gun – but not a real gun – within 150 feet of a school.
The new ban was included in a larger bill that would nix any local laws prohibiting people with gun permits from taking guns to parks.
The headline in The Tennessean read, in all seriousness, “House bill bans fake guns – not real guns – near schools.”
What’s especially striking about this story are the circumstances that led state lawmakers to take a look at gun policy in the first place.
As Rachel noted on the show last night, the National Rifle Association’s annual conference starts this week in Nashville, and Tennessee’s Republican-led state government was looking for a way to approve a “thank-you” gift to the NRA in the form of new state policy. The legislature set aside several days of legislating on the issue, which affectionately became known as “gun week.”
As part of the process, lawmakers wondered what to do about a guy known locally as “the Radnor Lake Rambo,” who has a habit of walking around outside courthouses and schools while wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an assault rifle, which tends to freak people out.
So, one Republican state legislator figured that as long as Tennessee was in the midst of “gun week,” maybe they should do something about the Rambo guy who tends to scare the bejesus out of people. But GOP lawmakers also didn’t want to do anything that might offend the National Rifle Association.
What’d they come up with? A ban on squirt guns. As Rachel explained:
“It’s a ban on fake guns, toy guns, things like squirt guns would be banned specifically anywhere near Tennessee schools. No squirt guns, no fake guns within 150 feet of Tennessee schools.
“Real guns are still OK. But squirt guns and toy guns would be illegal outside of schools under the new law. The ostensible reason for this new language was to respond to the Radnor Lake Rambo guy. The Tennessean newspaper helpfully points out that that guy is actually carrying real guns, so he’d still be OK to keep doing what he’s doing under the new law. But if your personal plan to stop that guy was to sully his bullet proof vest with a squirt from your super soaker, you would be the Tennessee gun criminal now, not him.”
Right. If you stood near a school with a loaded AR-15, that would be legal. If you stood near a school with a water pistol, that’d be illegal.
This, evidently, got a little too weird for the legislature, which decided to slow the whole process down, even if that meant not being able to present the NRA with a legislative gift by tomorrow.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 10, 2015
“Super-Wacko-Birds”: Another Step In The Evolution Of Super-PACs As Instruments For Donor Control Of Politicians
Ted Cruz has managed to distract attention from Rand Paul’s campaign launch by letting it be known that four Super-PACs have been set up to support his own candidacy, with commitments already in for a cool $31 million. If you boil off all the chattering about the size of the contributions (not really all that much in the larger scheme of things) and the amnesia about the role Super-PACs played in 2012, two things seem to make this noteworthy: how early the money came in, and the structure of the Cruz Super-PACS, which suggest an unprecedented degree of specialization and micro-managing of Grandee dollars.
This latter dimension was explored at Bloomberg Politics (which broke the story on the Cruz Super-PACs) by Julie Bykowicz and Heidi Przybyla:
One of the constellation of committees first reported Wednesday by Bloomberg appears to be underwritten by Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer and his family. Campaign lawyers said the arrangement is unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.
“It’s something to watch,” said Jason Abel of Steptoe & Johnson, who is not involved with the super-PACs. Abel and other lawyers speculated that multiple committees, all of which are named some form of “Keep the Promise,” were created to satisfy the whims of individual donors.
“It appears that setting up multiple super-PACs would allow maximum flexibility for certain donors to push their issues,” Abel said. The Campaign Legal Center’s Paul Ryan suggested that the arrangement creates “different pots of money for donors to fund different things.”
A strategist involved with the committees, who asked not to be named because he’s not authorized to speak publicly, corroborated those theories. Each of the super-PACs—Keep the Promise and three “sub-super-PACs” dubbed Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II and Keep the Promise III—will be controlled by a different donor family, and will likely develop different specialities, such as data mining, television advertising and polling, the strategist said.
If that’s accurate, it means another step in the evolution of Super-PACs as instruments for donor control of politicians. The 2012 versions were organizations set up by candidates to serve as conduits for big donor dollars that didn’t just go into the hungry maw of the campaign, much less national “issue organizations,” but went directly into ads or other tangible products. It seems the Cruz Super-PACs will allow even greater targeting of dollars beyond the control of the candidate and his dollar-hungry consultants. Add in the early timing, and it’s plausible that these Super-Wacko-Birds feel they are steering rather than simply maintaining the Cruz campaign. I guess that’s how these people want to roll.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 9, 2015
“Rand Paul Is Already Doomed”: The Simple Reason Why He Will Never, Ever Be President
William F. Buckley Jr. once famously said that Republicans should nominate the most conservative candidate who can also win. The test has proven a surprisingly accurate predictor of the party’s presidential candidate: Mitt Romney beat the unelectable conservatives to his right; George W. Bush beat the waffling conservatives to his left.
This time around, most of the potential GOP candidates once again lack either broad electoral appeal (Ted Cruz) or the credentials to win over the conservative base (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie). One candidate, however, has the unique distinction of failing both of Buckley’s criteria: Rand Paul.
The Kentucky senator, who officially announced his presidential run on Tuesday, is perhaps alone among Republican candidates in being both insufficiently right-wing and too far outside the mainstream of American politics. Because of these twin weaknesses, Paul is spectacularly ill-suited to capture his party’s nomination.
Paul’s problems with the right are legion, but it’s his foreign policy views — from ISIS to Russia to Cuba — that most obviously separate him from conservatives. On Iran, for instance, the Republican Congress has repeatedly flayed President Obama for failing to confront the dire threat posed by the ayatollahs. But in 2007, Paul said that “…If you look at it intellectually, look at the evidence that Iran is not a threat. Iran cannot even refine their own gasoline,” according to Bloomberg News.
As his presidential campaign drew near, Paul lurched to put himself closer to the mainstream of the Republican party. But even if he now falls completely in lockstep with conservatives, it’s hard to imagine how Paul can escape the shadow of his former statements. In 2009, for instance, Paul suggested that former Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to invade Iraq to benefit his former employer, Halliburton. Then there was his policy speech on the Ukraine last year, which the National Review called “bizarre and delusional.” There’s also Paul’s flip-flopping on the legality of drone strikes.
Conservatives are clearly unconvinced by the reinvention, and Paul’s opponents are already jumping at the chance to portray him as an isolationist unconcerned about global terrorism. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a possible presidential candidate, said this week that Paul is “to the left of Barack Obama” on foreign policy. Conservative hawks have already purchased $1 million in advertising to portray Paul as dangerous on foreign policy, according to The New York Times.
Paul, of course, is not alone among GOP contenders in facing challenges winning over the right-wing. Jeb Bush, in particular, has already been criticized for his (allegedly) conciliatory views on immigration and education. Romney was able to overcome similar suspicions on the right.
The difference is that where Bush’s heresies broaden his possible base of support, Paul’s actually make him less appealing in a general election. Romney could plausibly argue that his history of working with Democrats in Massachusetts made him more likely to beat Obama. Jeb Bush can rightfully claim that a more humane immigration policy will give Republicans a better shot with Hispanic voters.
Though infuriating to conservatives, these appeals to electoral realities won valuable insider support for Romney. They’ve proven similarly effective at giving Bush the edge in the “invisible primary” with the establishment. But what comparable electoral advantage could Paul claim from his controversial heterodoxies on foreign policy? And that’s before we even mention his policy quirks outside the realm of international relations — like, for example, the strange beliefs about monetarism he inherited from his father (the economically dubious suggestion that America return to the gold standard chief among them). His more humane approach to criminal sentencing is similarly unlikely to win over conservatives.
And so, even as Paul launches his campaign in earnest, one thing is certain about the 2016 race: We don’t know who the Republicans will nominate for president. We just know it won’t be Rand Paul.
By: Jeff Stein, a recent Cornell graduate and The Editor of the Ithaca Voice; Salon, April 7, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 