NY magazine

ntbcw new yorker

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omg trio consistently, spectacularly and devastatingly WRONG! punditry at worst/lethal

jon chait

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/arthur-laffer-lawrence-kudlow-stephen-moore-public-health.html

no lnx

THE NATIONAL INTEREST APR. 25, 2020

The Fatal Calculations of the Economists Steering Our Public Health

By Jonathan Chait

One night in late March, President Trump, seized by one of his periodic bouts of dismay with his public-health officials, sought out a second opinion on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. He called Arthur Laffer. After missing the president’s first three calls, the 79-year-old Laffer finally answered, and the two men connected for what Laffer described as “a very serious conversation,” shortly after which Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

Trump gravitated back to his public-health advisers, but he is again lurching toward the opposite pole — one anchored by Laffer and his close allies: National Economic Council head Lawrence Kudlow and economic adviser Stephen Moore. They have seized on their historic role as the antagonists to the administration’s public-health wing because they have a particular competence of their own, honed over decades: persuading Republican officials to ignore experts.

Even before his current role, Laffer was perhaps the most successful policy entrepreneur in modern American history, at least if measured by political influence.In the 1970s, as an economics professor who had served in Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget, Laffer developed a friendship with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, whose job had previously included defending Richard Nixon’s conduct in the Watergate scandal. The two came to believe that Laffer had developed a blinding insight with world-historical ramifications. A tax rate of either zero or 100 would yield no tax revenue at all, Laffer posited. Drawing a sloping, sideways curve between those points, he further hypothesized that reducing tax rates might increase revenue.

The “Laffer curve,” which at one point Laffer drew on a cocktail napkin for an impressed Dick Cheney (the Smithsonian now claims to display the original), formed the basis of what became known as “supply-side economics.” The doctrine held not only that tax cuts could increase tax revenue, but that changes in tax rates were the primary driver of all economic events. Republican economist Herb Stein coined the name as a term of derision, intending to highlight the absurdity of building a model entirely on one side of the economy instead of considering both supply and demand. Economic experts mocked Laffer’s notion that reductions in tax rates at existing levels could produce anywhere close to enough new economic growth to pay for itself.

And the experts … were completely right. After supply-siders converted Ronald Reagan and promised his tax cuts would pay for themselves, revenue hemorrhaged. Reagan’s non-supply-side advisers prevailed upon him to sign a series of tax increases for the purpose of “reducing the size of the nation’s fiscal disaster,” his budget director later admitted. When Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, supply-siders insisted he would kill the recovery and reduce tax revenue. Instead, revenue soared far higher than anybody had forecast.

Kudlow and Moore began ascending in the 1980s, shuttling between right-wing think tanks and media — especially the Journal editorial page, which remained the high temple of the supply-side cult. I first came across Moore when he was writing Journal columns arguing that the supply-siders had been right to predict Bill Clinton’s tax hike would reduce revenue. (A hallmark of supply-side thought has been to refuse to concede any error or complication in its analysis.) The supply-siders went on to insist that George W. Bush’s tax cuts would produce untold prosperity. Moore wrote a book called Bullish on Bush, and Kudlow wrote the foreword to The Bush Boom and a series of columns dismissing “pessimistas” who detected economic turmoil. “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong,” he wrote in December 2007.

In the spring of 2016, just after Trump had sewn up the nomination, Laffer, Kudlow, and Moore set out to meet the candidate at Trump Tower. Like many members of the conservative elite, they initially harbored reservations. But unlike foreign-policy hawks or social traditionalists, their concerns were devoid of any moral component, like a suspicion of dictators or philanderers. Their sole misgiving concerned Trump’s populist rhetoric and occasional campaign vows to raise his own taxes. The troika wanted to find out if he really meant it. To their relief, he didn’t. “He wanted tax cuts. He wanted to deregulate, he wanted to get the government out of the way,” Kudlow recounted in the foreword to Laffer and Moore’s laudatory book, Trumponomics. “The three of us saw Trump in a whole new light.”

We’ll come out of this soon, the economy will reopen, the economy will restart. It will, I hope, take care of itself. Markets will take care of themselves over time.

— Larry Kudlow, optimistic as oil prices tanked, on April 22

Kudlow joined the administration as Trump’s chief economic adviser. Trump announced he would nominate Moore for the Federal Reserve Board, but the Senate killed Moore’s bid over a combination of embarrassing ignorance of the subject — just two years before, he’d admitted on a panel, “I’m not an expert on monetary policy” — and years of sexist comments, including an obsessive hatred of women working as play-by-play commentators on basketball games. He and Laffer instead served as outside advisers and allies to Trump, who last summer bestowed a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Laffer.

Trump rewarded their confidence by implementing a large corporate tax cut, which was intended to encourage more corporate investment and therefore “would yield about the same revenue — and possibly more — than the current system,” Laffer and Moore wrote in Trumponomics. Naturally, it failed. Business owners got a windfall, but there was no corporate-investment boom and corporate-tax revenue fell by more than a third. Just as naturally, they acted as if events had proved them right.

And so, when the coronavirus struck, Trump had on hand a coterie of loyalists who would not hesitate to question legitimate experts.Kudlow forcefully endorsed Trump’s optimism that the virus would never spread. On February 25, Kudlow said it had been “contained … pretty close to airtight.” Even two weeks later, he was insisting, “I would still argue to you that this thing is contained.”

When public-health officials persuaded Trump to abandon his denialism, the supply-siders formed the resistance. Applying Laffer’s old dictum, “All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand,” they reasoned that the problem facing the economy was not a deadly pandemic but, as ever, bad incentives imposed by government — in this case, restrictions on business and excessively generous unemployment benefits that “discourage work.” If the government just stopped suppressing incentives, the economy would spring back to life.

The Journal editorial page published some of the first pushback against the wisdom of lockdowns. As early as mid-March, Moore denounced on Fox News the first closings, in California, as “a very dangerous, almost Orwellian situation.” Trump began repeating the supply-siders’ warnings that he had ceded too much authority to scientists (“If it was up to the doctors,” he mused, “they might say shut down the entire world”). Trump relented to his public-health experts but, by early April, was again listening to the supply-siders. Moore began proposing May 1 as a deadline to reopen the economy, a timeline Trump endorsed soon thereafter.

The supply-siders’ struggle to tug Trump away from his medical experts has both public and private facets. Laffer and Moore promoted a new administration task force to focus on economic reopening, a counterweight to the coronavirus task force led by doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. Moore encouraged anti-shutdown protests in several states to pressure governors to speed up their timetables for reopening businesses. “I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks,” he explained, “They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties.”

In their book, Laffer and Moore fondly recall Kudlow’s instructing Trump to ignore budget forecasts that tax cuts would reduce revenue. “Don’t get stressed out by the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters,” he said. “They are always wrong.” The message today is largely unchanged. The main difference is that the experts they are urging the president to dismiss are counting lives. We’re the beans.

This article appears in the April 27, 2020, issue of New York Magazine

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AN 5 25

New York Magazine columnist Ross Barkan urged against Americans bolting to the shores of foreign nations to escape Trump’s many attacks on civil liberties.

“[F]leeing the U.S. isn’t the answer,” said Barkan. “This is not the Vietnam War, when young men of draft age fled to Canada to avoid dying in an unpopular conflict thousands of miles away. … Fleeing is a cheap, ego-flattering maneuver; it helps no one.”

“Death camps are not being constructed, and opposition political parties are not being outlawed. This isn’t Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. America is, for all its flaws, a republic that has lasted more than 200 years,” Barkan said. “In nations bereft of any genuine democratic traditions — or those, like Hungary, that are quite small in population — versions of fascism are possible. But it’s very hard, despite the claims made by these histrionic academics, for it to actually happen here.”

Fascism “has happened here: in bursts, over and over again,” Barkan concedes, referring to former president Franklin Roosevelt tossing Japanese Americans into internment camps, and Abraham Lincoln suspending habeas corpus. Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist who appointed racist Southern politicians to cabinet positions, ordered the arrests of thousands of left-wing immigrants. And then there’s the rampant destruction of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and J. Edgar Hoover’s “long reign at the FBI” and “George W. Bush’s surveillance state.”

IFrame Content

Barkan referenced three prominent Yale professors who announced with much fanfare they were emigrating the United States for positions at the University of Toronto to escape Trumpism.

“If every left-leaning American adopted the posture of the Yale academics and trundled abroad, the nation would be hollowed out, with MAGA left to pick over its carcass,” he points out. “The U.S. is larger than MAGA and Trump and will outlast him. Trump is unpopular, and his party will not control the federal government in perpetuity. There are more elections to come, and Republicans could very well lose many of them. And the destruction Trump has wrought on the federal bureaucracy can eventually be undone: Executive orders, unlike legislation, are easy enough to reverse.”

Read the full New York Magazine column here.

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Is the Entire World Conspiring to Make It Look Like Trump Lost the Debate?

412 Comments

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

the national interest Sept. 12, 2024

Is the Entire World Conspiring to Make It Look Like Trump Lost the Debate? An intriguing theory by Matt Taibbi.

By Jonathan Chait, who’s been a New York political columnist since 2011.

In the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate, most reporters and analysts conveyed a similar narrative of what had transpired: Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump into an angry, frequently incoherent performance.

Why did so many journalists who witnessed the same event describe it so similarly? To Matt Taibbi, a popular commentator who has migrated from liberal-hating leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, there could be only one explanation: The entire news media was taking orders from the Democratic Party.

Taibbi’s post-debate column, headlined, “DNC Talking Points Become Instant Post-Debate Headlines,” advances a bold hypothesis. Taibbi amasses suspicious evidence of media collusion:

Conspiracies, pet-eating, and the “same old tired playbook” figured prominently in morning headlines. “Harris baits Trump over and over,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor. “Harris baits an aging Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self,” was Salon’s take. “Harris Baits and Batters Trump,” wrote the Miami Herald. “Harris Baits Trump Into Arguments,” added CNN. “Harris Baits Trump: Inside their Fiery Debate,” was another Times headline, while The Wall Street Journal went with “Harris Baits Trump in Fiery Presidential Debate.” There were cheers that Harris was able to “bait him into defending himself rather than talking about issues.” And on and on. Instantly, bait everywhere. No wonder Jake Tapper talked about fishing after the event.

“As one of the last relics of the ‘Boys on the Bus’ era, I don’t recall campaign messaging being this crude, or politicians, press, and audience acting so overtly as a chorus,” he writes, “the DNC or RNC just backing up to the commentariat, dumping loads of phrases, and seeing them instantly converted to conventional wisdom, that’s new.”

Taibbi’s theory suffers from two serious flaws. The first lies in the linear nature of time. Taibbi seizes on a Democratic Party press release summarizing reactions to the debate and concludes that the reactions were implanted by the party into the media. But the news release came after the reactions. That is how it was able to quote them.

The simplest account of how this occurred, and one that comports with mainstream physics, is as follows:

The debate occurred.

Many observers, witnessing the debate, had more or less the same impression.

They recorded their impression on social or traditional media.

The Democratic Party’s media-relations staff read these accounts and shared some of them.

I believe this makes much more sense than Taibbi’s belief that the Democrats secretly instructed a wide array of journalists what to say happened at the debate.

The second flaw with Taibbi’s analysis is that the belief Trump looked terrible was shared by many people who could not possibly be controlled by the Democratic message machine. As the debate occurred in real time, online betting markets moved in Harris’s direction, and Trump’s scammy meme stock plunged.

What’s more, the conclusion that Harris effectively baited Trump into an incoherent performance was echoed by many observers who are sympathetic to Trump. “Trump Took the Bait. Harris Kept Her Cool,” wrote Eli Lake in The Free Press. “He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him,” moaned Brit Hume on Fox News. “She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set multiple traps so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years,” complained The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

If Trump’s performance was in any way flawed, Taibbi argues, it is only because the moderators rigged the contest in Harris’s favor. “The world of that debate contained no speech panic, no arrest of Pavel Durov, no assassination attempt, no cover-up of Biden’s health, no oddity in the sudden embrace of Dick Cheney, no mention of a half-dozen bizarre things that only just happened,” he insists.

Interestingly enough, Taibbi’s assessment of Trump’s performance is much more forgiving than that of Trump’s own advisers, who were apoplectic over his incoherent rants. “The [former] president was supposed to pivot but Trump blew it,” a campaign insider tells Marc Caputo. “He was supposed to make her own the Biden record. That didn’t really happen.” Trump advisers unloaded to Axios, noting that Trump simply declined to exploit the opportunities given to him by ABC News. “He was told to hold her accountable for the deadly, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet when the moderators teed up that softball twice, he swung at other topics.”

So where a supermajority of the viewing public, investors, betting markets, numerous conservative pundits, and Trump advisers all saw the same thing, Taibbi discerned something totally different. The Donald Trump Taibbi watched was a lone voice of reason, much as Taibbi sees himself:

Trump kept lashing out like a person clinging to an outdated conception of sanity, like he hadn’t gotten the reality-by-fiat memo …

They surrounded Trump with rigid consensus framing and watched him flail against it, which did make him look frustrated, old, and at times like a candidate for the political glue factory. But crazy? Not sure about that. If conventional wisdom says you’re crazy, that doesn’t make it true. What if it’s the other way around?

Yes, perhaps the only two sane people in the universe are Donald Trump and Matt Taibbi. Or maybe there is some other explanation.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/gop-qanon/

Over the last few years, QAnon has slowly infiltrated the Republican Party, replacing its traditional conservative values with far-right conspiratorial theories that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, NY Mag's Jacob Silverman is explaining how QAnon has practically overtaken the Republican Party. While the radicalized beliefs were previously verbalized among factions of the political party, Silverman notes how those beliefs are progressively becoming more mainstream.

"QAnon’s adherents tend to espouse some selection of bizarre beliefs from the conspiracist’s buffet that includes accusations of pedophile politicians eating children, secret political tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, a great bloodletting, and Donald Trump swooping in to free us from evil. One day. Or maybe the day after. The prophecy is flexible, which is why it has evolved and endured."

Explaining the timeline of the political party's downward spiral, Silverman noted how the actions of Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, are an example of the radical shift in Republican values and belief systems.

"The latest exemplar of the GOP’s descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a well-connected conservative activist who recently admitted to attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C.," he writes. "Ginni’s right-wing beliefs have long been known, but leaked texts between her and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed Thomas’ commitment to overturning the election, based on an apparently sincere belief that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency. She encouraged Meadows to help put a stop to Democratic perfidy. 'The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,' went one message to Meadows, encouraging him to stand strong."

Silverman is also highlighting Republican lawmakers' latest actions that signal the party's shift toward more extremist beliefs.

"The signs of the Republican slide towardfull epistemic crackup are all around us," Silverman writes. "One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the 'why do you want to hurt children?'-type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers 'grooming' children on Fox News. The ginned-up moral panic, centered around the child exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."

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