Deer in the Headlights?
Susan Collins on Meet the Press, December 4, 2017:
SUSAN COLLINS: Apply [that] to [the] four-tenths of one percent increase in the GDP generates revenues of a trillion dollars, a trillion dollars.... I’ve talked four economists, including the Dean of the Columbia School of Business and former chairs of the councils of economic advisors and they believe that it will have this impact. So I think if we can stimulate the economy, create more jobs, that does generate more revenue...
CHUCK TODD: But why isn't there a single study? I'm going to show you three studies that we have, sort of a liberal one, a centrist one, and a conservative one right up there. The most conservative one, the most pro-economic growth argument, still adds $516 billion to the deficit over ten years...
SUSAN COLLINS: Well, talk to economists like Glenn Hubbard and Larry Lindsey and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who used to be head of the C.B.O. And they will tell you otherwise. So I think you will find that economists just don't agree on this...
The fourth economist—if he is indeed a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers—must by process of elimination be either Greg Mankiw or Eddie Lazear.
Even though Susan Collins called them out as authorities, none of Hubbard, Lindsey, and Holtz-Eakin—and neither Mankiw nor Lazear—has published anything on the tax “reform“ proposal in the past two weeks. None of them has written anywhere that I have seen that the conference report would be a good thing for America in anything published with his name at the top. None of them has written anywhere that I have seen that the conference report would be a bad thing for America in anything published with his name at the top.
But they must have opinions, mustn't they? And they must think their opinions are worth broadcasting, mustn't they? And Susan Collins has given them an opening to nearly every print media outlet in the country, hasn't she?
Are they all that frozen? Deer in the headlights? Too scared to write in public that the conference report is a good thing for America? And also too scared to write in public that the conference report is a bad thing for America?
