Yesterday, I thought it would be interesting to look at what people were saying about Candidate McCain's professed economic and tax policies, given the Center for American Progress study that shows him to be a fervent believer in the laughable Laffer "throwing away revenues to the rich makes more money for everybody, even for the government that gave it away" and despicable Norquist "tax everybody but the rich" campaigns to return our tax and economic policies to the good ol' days pre FDR.
Remember that McCain admitted that he knows almost nothing about economics. The vacuity of his campaign website's verbiage on fiscal and tax policy issues provides a fairly clear demonstration that he was, at least on this, speaking truth.
This little snippet from Dani Rodrick's Weblog may explain what's going on.
Kevin Hassett, economics advisor to John McCain, is quoted today as saying:
What really happens is that the economy grows more vigorously when you lower tax rates. It is beyond the reach of economic science to explain precisely why that happens, but it does.
Now you can be excused for thinking that the first of these statements is true, if you have an economically sound reason for it. But if you don't, you shouldn't.
Let's call it no longer supply-side economics. It is faith-based economics.
Maybe that's why economics has so often been called "the dismal science"--because for too many purported economists, like Kevin Hassett, there is so often so little science there.
The comments on Rodrik's posting are also unusually interesting. Robert Feinman, for example, offers the following:
Henry George had interesting ideas, but nobody reads him any more because the one organization devoted to promoting his work runs on a shoestring.
Compare this with the funding behind Heritage, Hoover, Cato, George Mason U, and a score of others. If you dig deep enough you will find the same core group of people funding all these propaganda factories: Coors, Scaife, Mars, Waltons, Koch, Olin, etc.
Liberals think that the "truth" will come out if there is an open debate of ideas. The plutocrats prefer to fund their version of the truth to guarantee that their viewpoint becomes widespread. They have been remarkably successful over the past 40 years.
This, of course, part of the concept I have espoused in this blog of "democratic egalitariansm." Where elite families with extraordinary wealth retain that wealth and use it to influence the governing institutions, not only is "truth" hard to come by, but any efforts to undo the machinery that feeds the power that grows from the wealth are akin to scaling Mount Everest. And that, of course, is what Jim Repetti is talking about when he says we need to consider the role of taxes in a democracy even in defining the underlying justice principles that decide how we set our tax base and rates. See my earlier posting on Repetti's articles.
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