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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (294203)	7/11/2006 9:30:39 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574489

Irving Kristol and the Coming of Supply-Side Economics One of the strangest episodes in late twentieth century American economic policy was the sudden rise to prominence in the late 1970s of supply-side economics: the doctrine that tax cuts could be had for free, without causing budget deficits. America's supply-side experiment in the 1980s turned out to be a disaster. The government deficits it caused drained the flow of capital available to finance investment in America. It made America poorer than it would otherwise have been by somewhere between $80 billion and $400 billion a year in lower living standards and lost incomes. The puzzle is why so many people in the Republican Party and on the right believed in supply-side economics. Irving Kristol--then editor of The Public Interest, and a leading figure behind the rise of supply-side economics--has now given us an answer: they never did believe in supply-side economics. In the 1995 Public Interest Kristol writes that: "The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority--so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government." Hence his: "...own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems." On one level, this makes the rise of supply-side economics more intelligible: Irving Kristol and his followers never believed in it, they simply pretended to believe in it because they thought it would be a politically-effective doctrine. On a second level, this makes the rise of supply-side economics even harder to understand. j-bradford-delong.net