And of course the nonsensical Republican's supplyside economics put forth, I believe by Laffer and Friedman and starting with Reagan i.e. (cut taxes, always-lol).
It's no big deal that Stiglitz, Samuelson, and Krugman called that nonsense, since it isn't what the Reagan program was in the first place. You've absorbed the comic book/mythical version of Reagan's economic program, which Martin Anderson dismisses as "the myth of the supply siders" in his memoir as one of Reagan's principle economic advisers.
You should read Martin Anderson's Revolution and Lawrence Lindsey's The Growth Experiment if you prefer to be informed, rather than to promote the nonsense that is commonly tossed about by people with little to no knowledge of what the Reagan program was, or what it sought to achieve. It did achieve the goals it strove for, which was to kill inflation and to break the economy out of the stagnation of the 70s. It never claimed that "tax cuts would pay for themselves". It did expect that economic growth would recoup over 60 cents of each dollar cut in tax reductions, and that is what happened.
With regard to Friedman. He was a proponent of "self regulating capitalism" (He was captain of the Chicago boys". Friedman called Nixon the biggest socialist of all the presidents when he advocated wage and price controls.
I guess that depends on what part of Friedman's writing you read. In A Monetary History of the United States he praises the New Deal's FDIC as the most important innovation in banking since the Civil War. As for wage and price controls, they are worse than socialistic, they are ineffective and unfair. Price controls just cause shortages when market costs fail to obey the dictates of politicians. Wage controls cheat employees out of raises. Who needs to bust unions when you can just pass wage controls? |
