To Regain Its Sanity, the Republican Party Must Give Up

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Oct 18, 2017 at 11:16 AM 327

Quote:

To Regain Its Sanity, the Republican Party Must Give Up Voodoo Economics

This crazy might be the deepest rooted.

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BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
OCT 17, 2017

Professor Krugman seems miffed, via the NYT:

Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement. Made-up sob stories about family farms broken up to pay inheritance taxes, magical claims about self-financing tax cuts, and so on go all the way back to the 1970s. But the selling of tax cuts under Trump has taken things to a whole new level, both in terms of the brazenness of the lies and their sheer number.

Both the depth and the breadth of the dishonesty make it hard even for those of us who do this for a living to keep track.

You knew this was coming when the president* tweeted out how proud he was that his tax plan was praised by Arthur Laffer, the cocktail-napkin Kreskin of supply-side economics, the original sorcerer who concocted the spells that produced those magical tax cuts, and, finally, the guy who fed the Republican Party a bowl of the very tastiest monkeybrains.

The prion disease's first symptom was the adoption of what Poppy Bush called, correctly, the "voodoo economics" of Ronald Reagan's first budget.

The Republican Party bought into an economic theory that was just as detached from reality as anything Reagan ever said about trees and air pollution, or anything the current president* has said about anything.

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That theory is now accepted as irrefutable dogma. Outside of the social issues, which the Republicans subcontracted to an extreme splinter of American Protestantism, supply-side has been central to everything that the modern conservative movement has brought to the Republicans.

It is the linchpin of 40 years of conservative Republican politics, and it is rusted in place and it's now immovable. It is at best a fanciful dream and, at worst, as Krugman points out, it's a provable fraud made up of hundreds of smaller frauds.

Oh, and there were the recent state-level experiments. Sam Brownback slashed taxes in Kansas, promising an economic miracle; all he got was a fiscal crisis. Jerry Brown raised taxes in California, amid predictions of – you guessed it – disaster; the economy boomed, and the main problem is a housing shortage.

There is nothing, nothing at all, in this history that would make any open-minded person believe that the Trump tax plan will cause dramatically accelerated growth.

Quite simply, if the Republican party is going to regain its sanity, it has to give up all of the crazy, and this perception of how the economy works is the most deeply rooted crazy there is.

If you can believe at this point that tax cuts pay for themselves, how hard is it to believe that climate change is a hoax? If Professor Krugman can survive the next few months without taking hostages, it will be a genuine miracle.

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