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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (6721)	12/13/2005 5:26:11 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542043

That was an impressive feat of memory! Indeed, I don't know if I'd read that particular column but certainly the Norquist attitude is something I'd seen. I do wonder if the ideal society for the 'starve the beasters' is modelled on something like Rio de Janeiro, with a few extremely rich, some huddled middle-class enclaves and vast shanty towns where the cheap servants live? They, of course, would come from the rich classes. Or exactly what do they expect to be the product of their ideas, say 20 or even 10 years on?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (6721)	12/13/2005 9:14:49 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 542043

Irving Kristol, in his role as co-editor of The Public Interest, was arguably the single most important proponent of supply-side economics. Interesting Krugman column, Dale. But I wonder about this assertion. I recall both The Public Interest and Kristol's role in it as largely, if not singularly, focused on building US defenses against a presumed Russian build up. It was not so much that he was anti-communist but that he wished to focus a great deal more effort there than in other places in the budget. I do recall the journal published articles on supply side economics but I would not have called those neo-conservative arguments. I don't recall them connecting supply side economics to the Cold War, which, again, was the neo-con focus. Do you have a different memory?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (6721)	12/13/2005 10:14:48 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542043

That article presented the neocon economic theory much better than I was attempting to do. There is one little thing that I don't think it conveys completely. Supply-side economics is the friendly, attractive face of the tax-cut movement. I think that there are still people who bought into that nonsense about the Lafer curve and the notion that cutting taxes would bring in more revenue. What the supply-siders argued, however, was that there was a free lunch. Cutting marginal rates, they insisted, would lead to such a large increase in gross domestic product that it wouldn't be necessary to come up with offsetting spending cuts. This was what Krugman calls the "attractive face" but Strauss called the "noble lie". The neocons don't believe this, they agree it's voodoo economincs privately, but this is the story that they will unite behind in public. They think the public is too stupid to see through it. TP