Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Presenting Information:

• Cranks and Charlatans: Stephen Moore and the Club for Growth: One of my very worst book-purchase investments is looking me in the face from the fourth middle shelf right now: a yellow-covered book called It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last Hundred Years.... It is a not very bad book because its thesis is wrong—I agree with the thesis, which is that in almost every respect things are a lot better today than they were 100 years ago. It is a very bad book because I cannot trust a word, a paragraph in it. Every time I read a sentence, every time I read a page, I have to step back and think, "Is this yet another place where Stephen Moore is trying to make me into a fool?"...

Finance:

• Trying to blame poor nonwhite people and social democratic governance for the faults of Wall Street seemed to me several bridges too far back a decade ago. Yet Steve Moore and Larry Kudlow seem to have gained rather than lost influence on the right from their eagerness to do so. They very sharp Barry Ritholtz takes exception: Larry Ritholtz (2016): No, the CRA Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis:: "As Warren Buffett pal Charlie Munger says, 'Invert, always invert'. Assume Moore and Kudlow are correct, and the CRA did require banks to lend to unqualified, low-income buyers.... Here’s what we should have seen...

Federal Reserve:

• Why do people do this? Because it gets you invited back on to CNN. Why does it get you invited back on to CNN? That remains a mystery to me, and to others Brad Reed: Trump-Loving Economist Caught Red-Handed 'Making Up Numbers' by Ann Guest: "Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell busted Trump-loving economist Stephen Moore on Friday when he falsely claimed that we are seeing vast 'deflation' in the United States economy...

2017 and Other Tax Cuts:

• Greg Mankiw: The Bad Economics Behind Trump's Policies: ": "Moore and Laffer... learned the importance of flattering the boss.... The authors offer no credible evidence that the tax changes passed will lead to such high growth... that the president and his associates have bragged of, and that Moore and Laffer quote without explanation, caveat, or apology...

• Kevin Drum: The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Is More of a Joke than Ever: "Stephen Moore's maiden outing.... Reagan produced the slowest growth in... any decade since World War II. That's a real supply side triumph. Welcome to the Journal, Steve. You guys deserve each other...

State-Level Outcomes:

• Menzie Chinn (2014): Does a Low Tax/Right-to-Work/Low Minimum Wage Regime Correlate to Growth: ": "If a higher ALEC-Laffer ranking resulted in faster growth, then the points should line up along an upward sloping 45 degree line. This is not what I see.... The higher the ranking according to Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (currently chief economist of Heritage), and Jonathan Williams, the poorer the employment growth...

• ProGrowthLiberal (2015): Stephen Moore Tries to Claim There Is a "Debate" About North Carolina Employment Statistics: "Another silly parade of disinformation.... Moore wants to claim employment has soared... says there was a 'debate' about how many people dropped out of the workforce...

• Deron Lee: Why one editor won't run any more op-eds by the Heritage Foundation's top economist: "'I won’t be running anything else from Stephen Moore.' So says Miriam Pepper, editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star...

• Jared Bernstein (2016): Kansas and the Myth Of Trickle-Down Tax Cuts: "Brownback was persuaded by some of the same folks now advising Trump to sharply cut state income taxes and to fully exempt pass-through income.... Reality has had almost no perceptible impact on the cuts’ architects.... Steve Moore, a key trickler that pushed the plan in Kansas, didn’t see that coming: 'Sometimes it was legitimate, and sometimes it was a gaming of the tax system to pay the zero rate, so that loophole has to be closed', he said. 'Unless you have some rules about this, people really will shift income and they’ll find ways to legally avoid paying tax, and that was never the intention'. Who’d a thunk it?...

• The Kansas Republican Governance Experiment. Or Is That "Governance 'Experiment'"? Or Is That "'Governance' Experiment"?: Kansas is—in some strong sense—unbelievably loony. No sooner does Sam Brownback manage to plant his behind in the Governor's chair in Topeka, KS than does Kansas's share of American nonfarm jobs and people start to drop like a stone.... Kansas has seen none of the country's net employment growth over the past decade.... There is no sense in which the share of U.S. nonfarm employment in Kansas was in any sort of long-run decline.... But since Brownback took the chair over from Kathleen Sibelius and Mark Parkinson, it has been down, down, down, down. A fall of 6%-points in the relative share of employment in little more than six short years is astonishing in its rapidity...

• Ben Casselman et al.: The Kansas Experiment Is Bad News For Trump’s Tax Cuts: "The Kansas state legislature on Tuesday voted to override Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and roll back $1.2 billion of tax cuts over two years. The vote marked a bipartisan repudiation of what Brownback had described as an 'experiment' in a particular brand of anti-tax fiscal conservatism...

Trade Wars:

• Ben White: Morning Money: "Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore... [were] confident he and Kudlow could help nudge Trump away from his protectionist trade policies.... Moore noted that Trump has largely stopped talking about big tariffs on Chinese goods. Kudlow added: 'I think Mr. Trump does not want to see a wall of tariffs. He's actually pushed that rhetoric aside in recent months'...

• Note to Self: The Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, and Stephen Moore Have No Principles Whatsoever. Why Do You Ask?: Now that Stephen Moore has signed up with Donald Trump, he is opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership.... But... short months ago... Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer, and Stephen Moore (2015): "TPP Good For Both Sides Of The Pacific...

• China's (Lack of) Vulnerabilities: "As Karl Marx wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century: Imbalances in pre-capitalist economies do not produce aggregate demand crises and collapses. Why don't they? Because Pharaoh can always command that another pyramid be built, the king can always set out on another crusade, and the bishop can always build another cathedral...

Covering Up Iraq War Destruction:

• Everyone who gets a C in first-semester statistics knows that if your sample is random you do not have to double the number of data points when the population doubles. You do not have to increase the number of data points at all. And in the interest of trying to lowball civilian war deaths. Fake and fuzzy math in the service of trying to lowball civilian war deaths is not just stupid. It is evil: Stephen Moore (2006): 655,000 War Dead? A Bogus Study on Iraq Casualties: "The key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points.... Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million...

ObamaCare:

• Jonathan Chait: Guy Who Gets Paid to Say Obamacare Doesn’t Work Can’t Find a Single True Fact to Support His Case

#highlighted #publicsphere #economicsgonewrong #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility #forecasting