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Open in TheBrain

economist 2

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see main -ics/ists

SEE CHICAGO U AUSTRIAN VASEY MULLIGAN RFK JAY BHAT STANFORD

key in phased fallbacks

HERITAGE THUS PJT 2025?

see empirical fail/ bed stein award bad trio

SEE BEN STEIN AWARD KUDLOW LAFFER

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see santelli rant

aha: cable tv $ show (santelli rant)

economist manly rational truth teller, hard nosed empirical #'s guy vs eg ben stein pundit always wrong, (provably) but never in doubt/ out of demand

reductionism

cheerleaders for capitalism, social darwinism (if you're ppor, you are dumb, lazy, immoral

cable TV $ show: 1/20 brainfart, spark by kudlow, mnu on cnbc

networks have too

jrnlism free zone? libtard vulnerable?

7 22 aha remember newltr end of world grift hype fear

sage/savvy savior will warn you before so protect/profit

gold std --> constitutional currency?

bitcoin grift? libtard?

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OMFG MOORE COVID FAIL JAY B

GOT CBO TO ~ ACA?

April 17, 2026

Contact: HHS Press Office

[ 202-690-6343](tel: 202-690-6343)

Submit a Request for Comment

Secretary Kennedy Appoints Casey B. Mulligan as HHS Chief Economist and Regulatory Officer

WASHINGTON — April 17, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services today announced the appointment of Casey B. Mulligan, PhD, as Chief Economist and Chief Regulatory Officer. Mulligan is a renowned University of Chicago economist who served as Chief Economist on the Council of Economic Advisers during the first Trump Administration. He most recently served as the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Chief Counsel for Advocacy.

Mulligan will advise Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and other agency leaders on policy development to continue to make health care more affordable for the American people. His portfolio will include cost-benefit analysis of regulation, econometric modeling, and program evaluation of major expenditures.

“Casey Mulligan exemplifies the kind of top-tier talent we are bringing into HHS,” said Secretary Kennedy. “He played a central role in delivering President Trump’s economic policy successes, and now he will apply that same expertise to health care—an industry that makes up nearly one-fifth of our economy.”

“I’m honored that President Trump and Secretary Kennedy have tasked me with applying economic fundamentals to maximize health care affordability,” said Mulligan. “I look forward to working with the outstanding HHS leadership team they’ve assembled to prevent chronic disease and further reduce costs throughout the system.”

:{Mulligan received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University before earning his doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he became a Professor of Economics and co-founded the University’s Initiative on Enabling Choice and Competition in Healthcare. He is the author of the books You’re Hired!, an account of the record economic growth and prosperity in President Trump’s first term, WITH KEVIN ASSHAT

and Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform*.}:

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AN 9 26

President Donald Trump's economic policies, especially tariffs, are drawing strong criticism on both the left and the right, from liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich to conservative and libertarian economists known for their admiration for the late Milton Friedman (who viewed steep tariffs as terrible for both businesses and consumers). But according to The New Republic's Michael Tomasky, the GOP's problems with economics go way beyond Trump himself.

Tomasky, in a Monday morning article, argues that Republicans in general are failing to understand key economic concepts.

Tomasky recalls that during his 2024 campaign, Trump promised, "Under the Trump economic plan, we will cut your energy prices in half … We are going to bring energy down by 50 percent, 50 percent, 50 percent within 12 months from January 20, which is the day we go into office."

According to Tomasky, those promises are "relevant to us today on two levels."

"The first is the more obvious: He was lying out his know-you-what without any regard for whether these words would end up being true," Tomasky writes. "They just sounded good at the time, so he said them. Fifty percent in a year … The second level is more interesting — and more damning not only of Trump, but of the entire Republican Party and of conservatism generally, in this country and across the world, and not just in Trump's second term, but for all time.

And that is this: There is probably some way in which Trump actually believed he could lower energy prices — maybe not by 50 percent in a year, but lower them substantially and noticeably. Why would he believe this? He believed it because conservatives believe stupid, simplistic things about how the capitalist economy works."

Tomasky continues, "They believe that if you just let the free market do its thing, wonders will arise and all will be well. They believe this first and foremost because their big-money donors believe it. But they also believe it because the economists — or more precisely, the economists they prefer to listen to — say so, and they must know what they're talking about."

According to Tomasky, a "new generation of economists … have seen with their own two eyes that markets do not always self-correct" and now realize that "sometimes, government intervention is required to achieve good ends."

"In the midterm campaign," Tomasky writes, "Democrats are understandably focused on attacking Trump for his lies and making these higher prices we're paying all about him. That makes political sense … But longer term, the Democrats need to do much more. It would be great if they nominated a presidential candidate in 2028 who had the guts and the rhetorical skill to indict not just Trump, but conservatism and traditional economics more generally. It's not an accident that the last three, now four, GOP presidents have wrecked the economy: Bush, Bush, Trump, and Trump."

//

White House panic skyrockets as Trump triggers death spiral economy

Republicans fume as Trump breaks his own abysmal economic record

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2 26

thug shd be disciplined

acad econ suppress?! hasset

Now Trumpists Are Menacing Economists - YouTube

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Where Are The Friedmans Of Yesteryear?

Where Are The Friedmans Of Yesteryear?

January 10, 2015

I never got around to commenting on the infamous Economist list of influential economists; they’ve been given plenty of deserved grief, to which I needn’t add. But I think I might have something useful to say about a fact that is really unmistakable when you look at a list corrected by removing central bankers, or make a more subjective judgment: these days, the economist as public intellectual is overwhelmingly likely to be a liberal.

As Noah Smith says, it was not always thus. He argues that the field of economics has changed, with greater emphasis on market failures, and there’s arguably something to that. I’d also argue that the descent of right-leaning macroeconomics into hermetic absurdity matters quite a lot, because macro looms larger in the public sphere than it does within the academy.

But there’s another important factor. Modern conservatism doesn’t have Friedman-like figures — people who would be prominent economists thanks to their research whatever their politics, who are also public intellectuals– because it doesn’t want them. The movement prefers hacks, who needn’t be even minimally competent but can be counted on to defend the party line without any risk of taking an independent stand.

Let me offer my own two short subjective lists. I think if you were going to name the two current econoheroes of U.S. liberals they would probably be Joe Stiglitz and yours truly. (Thomas Piketty has made a huge and well-deserved splash, but so far only on one issue.) The thing that is obvious about Joe is that before becoming a public figure with a political following he established his reputation with vast amounts of widely cited academic research; you can get a sense of what he did by looking at his top entries on Google Scholar. And here are mine.

Now, who would be the conservative counterparts? Who gets cited by, say, Republican governors seeking authority for their tax cuts, or published on a regular basis on conservative opinion pages? I’d say Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer. No point in looking them up on Google Scholar, although Laffer does show up, marginally, for a 1971 paper co-authored with Eugene Fama.

And it’s not as if Moore and Laffer are guys who may lack academic cred but have proved themselves as working analysts. On the contrary, they’re guys who can’t even cook numbers without screwing up, who have spent years telling us to get ready for soaring interest and inflation rates. But it doesn’t matter; being right is not what they’re paid for.

So in trying to understand where the Milton Friedmans of yore have gone, you want to look at the demand side. The right lacks heavyweight economists with independent reputations partly because they are hard to find, but also because it doesn’t want them. Only hacks need apply.

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Conservative Economists in Exile in the Age of Trumpism - Stanford Politics

US Politics

Conservative Economists in Exile in the Age of Trumpism

By Andrew Granato on December 6, 2016

Tony Webster / CreativeCommons

One of the defining stories of the year was a guessing game: which of the political Right’s factions (neoconservatives, libertarians, the Religious Right, etc.) would go along with Trump’s gleeful trashing of traditional movement conservatism and assertion of a populist white nationalism? Where members of each faction chose to stand often said more about them than it did about Trump himself, who often seemed to be making it up as he went along, reversing his policy positions on a dime if it seemed worthwhile at that moment. And as it is with those factions, so it is with the world of conservative economic thought, where the arrival of Trumpism has scrambled alliances and may have fundamentally dislodged economists from Republican policy for years to come.

:{:{Among certain factions on the left, economics as a whole is regarded as a right-wing thorn in society’s side, little more than a corporate-tinged justification for ‘neoliberalism’ and greed. During the Reagan Era, the most well-known economist and public intellectual was conservative-libertarian Milton Friedman, who, in his bestselling books and widely watched PBS series, championed sharp cuts in marginal tax rates, cuts to welfare and entitlement programs, corporate deregulation, and the idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”}:

Republican President Reagan and Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher specifically cited and championed the works of economists like Friedman as well as those of the iconoclastic libertarian Austrian School, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludvig von Mises, which may have contributed to the perception of the field among some as a conservative outpost.}:

The view of economics as a vehicle for conservative ideology is a wild mischaracterization of the field as a whole, and Friedman, Hayek, and von Mises are not representative figures. Many economists work on issues that are not politically contentious, such as theoretical auction design or econometrics (specialized statistics), and their academic articles resemble papers in mathematics or computer science much more than competing policy arguments in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. When not mathematical theory, economics journals are usually populated by papers not embracing ideological visions, but performing rigorous proofs or hypothesis testing ofdata. Many economists, particularly those employed at institutions such as the Federal Reserve, try to avoid politicization of their work as much as possible.

While the field takes prevention of political bias in research quite seriously, when explicitly asked about their partisan preferences, a 2003survey of 1000 randomly selected economists actually reported voting for Democratic candidates over Republican ones by a ratio of 2.5 to 1, and a 2016study of faculty party registrations found that economists at 40 top US universities were more likely to be registered Democrats than Republicans by 4.5 to 1. In other words, if economists, in general or at top universities, were the only people who voted, the result would be a Democratic landslide unlike any ever seen in American political history.

:{:{Economists as a whole could only be considered right-wing in the context of the rest of academia, where the same 2003 survey found Democrats are preferred to Republicans by a ratio of 5.5 to 1 in political science, 6 to 1 in history, and 16 to 1 in sociology (the 2016 study of top universities found that faculty had shifted even further left, finding, for example, that the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans in elite history departments is now 33 to 1).}:

Also, because economists acknowledge that the fundamentals of supply and demand characterize markets and therefore resource allocation, they tend to have a certain bound on how far left they are willing to go, usually stopping at some point before outright government control of the means of production. In much of the social sciences and humanities, the only real political debates are between the center-left and the far-left, with conservatives considered a laughingstock and almost completely marginalized. Economists, on the other hand, although they still clearly lean left, have a long tradition and meaningful presence of conservative thought.}:

It is in this atmosphere that Trump has thrown everything into turmoil.

Drain the Ivory Tower

Before Trump arrived, the economic agenda of political conservatives was organized around several well-known planks: a preference for lower marginal tax rates (particularly on the wealthy) and free trade and opposition to regulation, unions, the minimum wage, deficits, redistributive programs, and economic stimulus.

But although conservative economists served in government economic positions such as the Council of Economic Advisors during Republican administrations, it was not only academics who could push their agendas, but also an assortment of non-academics working in grassroots organizations and some think tanks. Such people did not work in the field of economics or try to publish articles in economics journals, but instead promoted policy ideas like ‘supply-side economics’ or the famouspledge, developed by Grover Norquist, to never increase taxes on any individual or entity under any circumstances, ever. These activists attempted to use the basic vernacular of the field of economics, but did so without participating in the practices of the field meant to enforce rigorous accountability, like peer review.

A good predictor for whether an economics-affiliated conservative supported Trump during the campaign is whether he or she is an economist or one of these political activists. Conservative heavyweight think tanks stacked with economists, like the Hoover Institution or the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), were noticeably reticent about the election. Top officials in previous Republican administrations (John Taylor, Greg Mankiw, John Cochrane, Martin Feldstein, Glenn Hubbard, Richard Schmalensee, William Poole, and more) went on record opposing Trump.

When The Wall Street Journal contacted forty-five economists who had served on the Council of Economic Advisors under eight different presidents, not a single one supported Trump. When Trump initially put out his economic plan, economists across the spectrum immediatelysavaged it. With days to go before the election, a group of 370 economists, including eight Nobel Laureates, published a letter disparaging Trump for “magical thinking and conspiracy theories” just two days after a group of nineteen American economist Nobel Laureates published a letter endorsing Clinton; by contrast, a quadrennialletter signed by hundreds of economists in support of the GOP nominee this year simply registered objection to Clinton’s policies without mentioning Trump at all.

Meanwhile, when a group of over 130 pro-Trump intellectuals published a mission statement, only nine were economists on a list dominated by media commentators, cultural critics, and lawyers/law professors. When Trump unveiled his economic advisoryteam in August, out of the thirteen members, most of them were industry executives in finance and real estate, five of them were major donors to the Trump campaign, and only one, Peter Navarro, was an economist. Trump’s principal economic advisor on the list, Stephen Moore, the ‘chief economist’ at the Heritage Foundation, was a newspaper columnist and the founder of activist group Club For Growth who oncepublished an editorial so riddled with factual errors that the editorial page editor of the paper commented, “You assume Heritage has edited these pieces too. But, lesson learned. There will be no future Heritage pieces published that don’t get thorough fact-checking.”

After Trump’s initial tax plan waspilloried because it would have cost $10 trillion over the next decade, he deployed to fix it Moore and Larry Kudlow, a CNBC host and political pundit who infamouslydeclared that “President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country” and that “it’s a non-recession recession” in May of 2008. What’s more, Grover Norquist, who at one point gotall but seven House GOP Representatives to sign his pledge to never sign any form of tax increase, has been vocally pro-Trump.

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers put itbluntly in August:

Most conservative economists have bailed on Trump. But supply-side pseudo economists haven’t.”

While ideologically driven economic activists and a few CEOs, free of having to rigorously justify their assumptions and ideas to other researchers in as much as a research journal, constructed the barest outlines of a policy platform, the actual economists affiliated with the conservative movement rendered their verdict: #NeverTrump. Trump-supporting economic activists are of course free to argue for whatever positions they want, but it is extremely telling that they make these arguments using wild assumptions accepted by almost no one actually in the field, including the economists whose ideological priors lean right.

Trump demonstrated no interest in learning the standard conservative arguments for policies such as increasing the retirement age. The attributes of typical Republican policy he adhered to (tax cuts on the wealthy, repeal of Dodd-Frank) were far more important for the purpose of signaling to his wealthy donors that having him in office would serve their financial interest.

On other issues, Trump ditched the AEI and Hoover-approved conservative orthodoxy, flip-flopping repeatedly on the minimum wage, protesting against any proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and insisting on single-handedly throwing out “bad” trade deals. Trump, while hurling continuous invective at people of color, spent considerable energy on the campaign traimeetingl with working-class whites and claiming that he would turn around downwardly mobile white areas. To Trump, a “bad” trade deal was one that resulted in job loss for white workers in blue-collar positions. In this vein, Trump appropriated some of the traditional language of the left, like “[worker’s party,” a stance in sharp contrast to previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s lionization of “job creators.”

Trump triangulated his positions so as to balance his (whites-only) economic nationalism with giveaways to the GOP’s donor class like his highly regressive tax plan, making his economic policies a Frankenstein’s monster of the conservative policies most favorable to the rich alongside a populist affect of anti-trade and entitlement protection.

:{:{Conservative economists like Mankiw, Taylor, and Cochrane favor a tightly limited view of economic policy, in which the government should perform minimal action to uphold property rights, solve select public goods problems, and tax limited externalities, and go no further. This view involves support for policies like cuts to Social Security, a position which two-thirds of the general electorate and over half of the Republican electorateopposes.}:

It also involves support for free trade, a view upon which Trump has heaped scorn and Republican support has correspondingly tanked. While Trump does endorse massive, top-heavy tax cuts, many in the Republican base do not: almost a third of Republicans are willing to go as far as toendorse the statement that the government should “redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.” Conservative economists tend to oppose raising the minimum wage and sometimes support eliminating it entirely, but nearly40 percent of Republicans support raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour.}:

Lastly, economists, including conservative ones, tend to take a favorable view of immigration, and the Republican electorate remains decisively against it, includingfavoring a blanket ban on Muslims from entering the country. The vocal, strongly libertarian wing of the field, concentrated in the George Mason department (Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, Walter Williams, and Donald Boudreaux, among others), alsoviscerally opposes Trump. Such economists tend to be in favor of policies as radical as open borders — essentially Trumpism’s polar opposite.

In this context, it makes sense that conservative economists refused to play along with Trump, because conservative economists recommending policy tend to be committed to certain visions and ideas based on their priors and academic research, and the motley crew of Trump advisors was interested in some fusion of ideological enforcement and political power, even if it came by riding the coattails of a racist authoritarian with questionable fidelity to their positions.

With Trump having to settle into D.C., will he back off from his conservative heresies? Possibly. The institutional Republican Party retains many movement conservatives, and the Trumpist fever may die down. But the Republican electorate did not care about what ivory tower economists thought about policy when they selected their nominee, and their aggressive middle finger to the entire conservative movement signals what might be a fundamental break.

Since the election, Stephen Moore, that quintessential Reaganite, has directly told House Republicans that Reaganism isover and that the GOP is now a “populist working-class party.” Moore’s comment comes at a time when Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary isSteven Mnuchin, a hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs alumnus (who also sits on the board of a bank accused of refusing to lend to black and brown people). In the transition milieu, conservative economists are nowhere to be found, their fate in the Republican Party precarious at best.

*Andrew Granato, a senior studying economics, is a contributing editor of Stanford Political Journal.

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AN 10 25

Conservative economist and Independent Institute senior fellow Phillip W. Magness slammed the irony of President Donald Trump promising a Great Depression while advocating for one of the Great Depression’s chief causes.

If the courts neuter Trump’s unilateral tariffs on U.S. trading partners, the president is already considering an alternative method to keep the tariffs underway.

“One alternative the administration apparently is considering turning to is the discredited and effectively repealed Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which turned an economic downturn into a decade-long catastrophe,” said Magness.

Magness said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted Trump’s ‘Plan B’ involves resurrecting his tariff agenda with an obscure clause of this 95-year-old law known as Section 338.

“Section 338 did not work as intended, as Smoot-Hawley triggered a catastrophic global trade war that brought international commerce to a halt, destroyed the U.S. export market, and thrust us deeper into the Great Depression,” said Magness.”

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The stock market collapsed in 1929, heralding the beginning of the depression. But Magness said it became “Great” thanks to three “interventionist” blunders, one of which included the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, designed as a relief measure intended to “insulate American producers from turmoil on international markets and ‘stimulate’ them with the benefit of tariff protection.”

Instead, the Act triggered what Magness called a “lobbyist-driven free-for-all” as industries “clamored for favorable rates and special interest groups bribed their way onto the tariff schedule.”

“Our major trading partners retaliated by targeting American exports, which included the already beleaguered agricultural sector. U.S. exports dropped by 61 percent between 1930 and 1933, showing what economists had long predicted: attempts to insulate the country from foreign import competition affect the entire economy and ultimately hurt domestic industries as well,” Magness said.

Congress soon realized its error and passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which authorized the panicking president to lower tariff rates by up to 50 percent by negotiating reciprocal concessions from other countries.

“The American economy is already slowing, warned Magness, “and our allies are deepening their commercial relationships with our enemies.”

“Until the Trump administration’s novel legal theories came along, Section 338 was long considered a dead letter — buried in shame with the rest of Smoot-Hawley’s economic legacy,” said Magness. “… One might have hoped that Smoot-Hawley’s inauspicious history would preclude the White House from turning to it, but apparently that’s not the case.”

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mma

Right-wing media touted Milei’s austerity schemes. Now Argentina might need a US bailout.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent floated a financial lifeline for the right-wing leader even as Trump cuts lifesaving foreign aid across the globe

Written by John Knefel

Published 09/26/25

Right-wing media figures have long embraced Argentina President Javier Milei and his extreme austerity and privatization measures, which have now plunged his country into chaos and even triggered the possibility of a bailout from President Donald Trump.

Conservative pundits have consistently celebrated Milei’s drastic cuts to pension programs and social services, sometimes offering them as a template for domestic policy. When Milei took office in late 2023, he implemented a suite of right-wing economic policies — deregulation, privatization, slashing public sector employment — and took steps to artificially bolster Argentina’s currency to bring down inflation. His government saw temporary success in taming inflation, but his policies created widespread misery and he’s now facing a political backlash that threatens to compound Argentina’s troubles.

With the Argentinian economy in free fall, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent assured global markets that the Trump administration would consider extending a series of extraordinary bailout measures to help Milei’s beleaguered government. On September 24, Bessent went as far as to admit the Trump administration’s goal was to provide Milei support to “bridge him to the election.”

For all the support Milei has gotten over the years from conservative media, Fox News and others in right-wing media have barely mentioned the potential bailout at all.

Conservative pundits have embraced Milei — some even prior to his victory in November 2023 — and have repeatedly pointed to his social spending cuts as a model for Trump’s administration.

The promised lifeline to Milei comes amid Trump’s escalating military campaign against Venezuela, which has included extrajudicial strikes on several boats in the Caribbean, and what The Associated Press terms “a unilateral wave of attacks from the Trump administration against Brazil” after former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, was sent to prison for attempting a coup. Those attacks have included blistering, retaliatory tariffs on Brazil as punishment for Bolsonaro's prosecution. The bifurcated approach — a carrot for Trump’s allies, a stick for his enemies — illustrates MAGA’s broader goals in Latin America.

Trump’s supposed beneficence to Argentina stands in stark contrast to his unprecedented cuts to foreign humanitarian aid and reveals his commitment to defending anti-left-wing politicians and market fundamentalism.

The move may have come as a surprise to some, given Trump's dismantling of the government’s foreign aid capacity, but what’s on offer to Argentina isn’t life-saving food and medicine to those in extreme poverty. Instead, it’s a lifeline to a far-right government hell-bent on eliminating social services and exposing its citizens to the discipline of the market. It’s a project shared by Trump, the Republican Party, and their right-wing media allies. In other words, Milei is too big to fail.

In December, The New York Times reported that Milei’s slash-and-burn approach has plunged more than 5 million people in the country into poverty. Although some financial elites praised his efforts to trim inflation, the effects for working class Argentines have been disastrous. Public sector wages cratered by 15 percent as Milei has forced workers into precarious gig and contract labor, part of his larger plan to privatize large sectors of the economy.

Unfortunately for Argentinians, Milei’s bloodletting has failed to cure the patient. Unemployment hit its highest level in four years in the first quarter of 2025, ticking down only slightly in the second quarter, largely due to jobs added in the informal economy. The economic downturn helped drive a loss by Milei’s party in recent local elections in Buenos Aires, which then spurred a run on the peso and a stock market collapse. Milei is facing legislative elections next month, further adding to the political crisis engulfing his administration.

Milei responded to his recent electoral loss by promising to “deepen and accelerate” his regulatory and privatization schemes. That level of commitment to right-wing economic orthodoxy may help explain why Trump recentlypraised Milei, at a bilateral meeting during the United Nations General Assembly, as having “done a fantastic job.”

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Fox News economist panel agrees Trump tariffs are bad for consumers 02/14/25

February 14, 2025, edition of Fox News' America Reports

SANDRA SMITH (ANCHOR): President Trump's looking to reshape trade with the signing yesterday of reciprocal tariffs. It comes just days after a hotter-than-expected CPI report showing that pressure is not letting up. For more on this let's bring in Doug Holtz-Eakin, former Congressional Budget Office director and American Action Forum president, and Jared Bernstein, former chair of the council of economic advisors. Thanks to both of you. Jared, it's nice to have you back on the program. So what do you think, by the way, so far of this administration's economic policies, having worked in the last administration?

JARED BERNSTEIN (FORMER CHAIR, U.S. COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS): I'm worried about the extent to which the tariff agenda is going to hurt American consumers. There is no question in my mind, and economist broadly agree on this, that tariffs work like a sales tax for the consumers of the country that's putting those tariffs on those imports. And to the extent that we have, already, a problem getting inflation back down to where we want it to be and especially given that the price level, what things actually cost — and trust me, I'm a veteran of this, I've have been through this for a bunch of years now — consumers really don't like that. Trump will not be able to keep the promises you just heard about getting prices down, and tariffs push the wrong way.

SMITH: Well, with all due respect, many say inflation is the ultimate tax on the American consumer. And most of that did happen under your watch during the administration.

Austan Goolsbee, who I don't consider a right-leaning economist by any stretch, formerly with the University of Chicago, now with the Chicago Federal Reserve, he was on this program this week and he said this about inflation ticking up in that latest number. Watch.

.....

SMITH: I was interested in that moment, Douglas. Your thoughts.

DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN (PRESIDENT, AMERICAN ACTION FORUM): I think you'd have to agree with Austan, you should be for growth, you should be for productivity and any supply side improvements that ease pressure on inflation and the price level.

But I'd have to concur with Jared that the tariffs is not the answer to that — those challenges. There is nearly universal agreement that those tariffs will be upward pressure on costs and consumers will ultimately pay them. The president's tariff agenda is very ambitious; it's not just a modest increase like his first presidency. This is every country, in a very complicated fashion, setting tariffs and essentially letting the other country dictate how high they go. Because if they raise taxes, we raise our tariffs. And so, I don't like giving up control of economic policy, and I don't like this aspect of the administration's portfolio.

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11 22

stephen Moore on Govzilla

Stephen Moore, senior economist at FreedomWorks and a former adviser to President Trump, argued that out-of-control spending by Congress has created a bloated government that needs to be brought down to size. This interview was conducted at FreedomFest, an…

omg trump 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

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-heritage-foundation-think-tank.html

nyt

heritage, demint dunlop:

Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessionsand many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.

“Feulner’s first law is people are policy,”Ed Feulner, Heritage’s founder and former president, told me recently. Feulner was the head of domestic policy for the Trump transition, charting the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and several other agencies. We met late on a Friday afternoon, in a sitting room at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, a private social club founded by a group of Treasury Department officials during the Civil War. At his feet as we spoke sat a small box of table cards for a dinner he was hosting at the club that evening for the newly appointed director of Trump’s National Economic Council, the television personalityLarry Kudlow— another name on Heritage’s Project to Restore America list. Now 76, ruddy, white-haired and content, almost jovial, Feulner founded Heritage decades ago as an ambitious young legislative aide with a radical dream built on a simple concept. As he put it, sinking deeper into his club chair: “First, you have to have the right people.”

...

While Feulner and his senior staff had reserved the right to review policy papers, they generally avoided intervening in the research and publication process. DeMint and his leadership team were much more aggressive. Papers were heavily edited or even withheld from release altogether. Several scholars quit. DeMint replaced them, bringing in as Heritage’s chief economist Stephen Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and a founder of the Club for Growth, a lobbying group that advocates cutting taxes.

...

The turnover rates have also been historic. In March, The New York Times reported that nine of the top 21 White House and cabinet positions have been emptied and refilled at least once; neither Obama nor Bush had lost a single cabinet member by that point in their administrations. Since taking office, Trump has replaced more than half of his 65 most influential advisers, according to a tracker created by the Brookings Institution. Christie recently laid the blame for the turnover on what he described as a “brutally unprofessional” transition, saying that proper vetting would have caught a lot of Trump’s most problematic appointees. A number of other senior advisers seem to be on shaky ground with the president, and an exodus is anticipated after the November midterm elections.

Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its unofficial staffing agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who helped draft Trump’s first budget, is back at the think tank. So are Stephen Moore, who worked on the Trump tax cuts; David Kreutzer, who played a key role in dissolving a White House working group that was studying the monetary costs associated with climate-warming carbon dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run the now-defunct voter-fraud commission, which was created to find evidence to support Trump’s baseless claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.

In a sense, the transition is still going, and as long as Trump remains in office it may never end. “I get calls from people every day who still want to go in,” Dunlop told me. “Or I’ll hear from the White House, or I’ll run into someone at a reception or over coffee, and I’ll say, ‘I’ve got a name for you. I’ll send it along.’ ”

reboot cold war paranoia?

7 22

Kevin Freeman talks with Frank Gaffney about the landmark court victory known as Jarkesy v. SEC and the Chinese economic warfare in the U.S. Patent and...

We are in an Economic War.

By Kevin Freeman

economic weapons deployed media coverage patriotic investing May 21, 2022

Kevin Freeman talks with Frank Gaffney about the impact of the Economic War we are facing from both domestic and foreign forces.

The Economic War Room

The Economic War Room monitors critical pressure points on an ongoing basis. We report who, what, when, where, and why they will impact you. More importantly, we bring in top experts to help you understand and respond to the threats they pose and how you can respond!

What People Are Saying About Kevin Freeman:

“Kevin Freeman understands the threat of financial terrorism as well as anyone. You’d have to be negligent to ignore his timely advice about protecting your family from the economic attacks that are clearly on the horizon.”

—FRANK KEATING,

Retired President and CEO, American Bankers Association, former governor of Oklahoma

“Along with the Internet our markets, banks, and other financial systems are vital institutions that are far more vulnerable to complete disruption than we would hope, especially to carefully-planned intervenors with the opportunity, motive, and means to, say, bring down the dollar. Freeman explains persuasively and clearly why we may be beginning the third act of a monetary and fiscal tragedy. You don’t care about dark pools, huge Middle-Eastern sovereign wealth funds, naked short selling, and bear runs? I’m afraid you will, and rather soon.”

—R JAMES WOOLSEY

Chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former Director of Central Intelligence

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yikes GCC  EBH ~

https://theintercept.com/2022/04/12/ipcc-report-global-climate-coalition/

OF THE PRIMARY reports that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes every four to six years, the mitigation report, focused on what can be done and what’s holding climate action back, only gets more important with every cycle. While the latest mitigationreport states clearly that politics and corporate power are the only real impediments to action — not a lack of scientific evidence, technological or policy options, or even money — IPCC authors declined to engage with this problem both in the press conference for the report and in the report’s summary for policymakers. Now, a week after the report’s release, here comes a paper revealing that the IPCC itself has been the target of U.S. vested interests since its inception.

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In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen gave a stark warning to the U.S. Senate, testifying, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” Later that year, the IPCC was formed to bring the world’s climate scientists together to help inform governments, the media, and the public about climate change. Just one year before all this action on the “greenhouse effect,” global leaders had effectively joined forces to address the hole in the ozone layer, adopting the Montreal Protocol and agreeing to a mandatory phaseout of the chemicals associated with ozone depletion. Greenhouse gas-emitting industries were very concerned that they would be targeted next. Almost immediately, what environmental sociologists call the “climate countermovement” began to form in response.

one key entity in that movement was the Global Climate Coalition,which emerged in 1989 as a project of the National Association of Manufacturers, with founding members from the coal, electric utility, oil and gas, automotive, and rail sectors. Many scholars have noted the influential role the GCC played in obstructing climate policy in the 1990s, but the first peer-reviewed paper on the group, published this week, reveals that the original and lasting intention of the GCC was to push for voluntary efforts only and torpedo international momentum toward setting mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Casting doubt on the science was part of that strategy from the beginning — the paper points to a 1994 communications strategy, for example, that suggested industry spokespeople downplay IPCC findings with following talking point: “The IPCC reports no evidence that directly links manmade GHG emissions to changes in global average temperatures.” Also common, though, were the delay tactics we still see today, particularly the economic argument against acting on the climate crisis and the jingoistic argument that America shouldn’t allow the rest of the world to tell it what to do.

“People have been very stuck on this idea that the industry strategy went from climate denial to delay,” said the paper’s author, Brown University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle. “That’s historically inaccurate. It was always about delay, and the PR guys viewed casting doubt on climate science as one of their key talking points, but not the only one and not the central one.”

Leaning on economic and cultural arguments came naturally for the public relations teams working on climate. Those arguments were first developed to help companies like Standard Oil and American Tobacco stave off regulation at the turn of the 20th century and have been deployed consistently, and effectively, ever since.

Brulle points to the GCC’s involvement in the passage of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC — the framework underpinning the annual Conference of the Parties meetings of global leaders to discuss international climate commitments — as a prime example of how industries have suggested voluntary action as a way to preempt government regulation. “They supported that because it was toothless. It was all about the need to further study the problem and for corporations and governments to take voluntary action.”

Melissa Aronczyk, a media studies scholar at Rutgers University, also documented the influence that the GCC and its primary PR person, E. Bruce Harrison,had on the UNFCCC process in “A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism,” a new book written with Maria Espinoza. “Harrison was invited as communications counsel to the CEOs who were participating at that Earth Summit in Rio [de Janeiro] in 1992,” Aronczyk explained. That was the summit at which global leaders drafted and adopted the UNFCCC. Notably, the U.N.-appointed organizer of that conference was Maurice Strong, a former oilman who believed that no effective climate treaty could be passed without buy-in from corporate interests....Because business communities had been invited to the conference and because they knew that their buy-in was so important, they planned extensively in the lead-up to the conference to be able to present what they call their own sustainable development charter.It was a nonbinding, nonlegal document that proposed a voluntary, self-regulating approach,” Aronczyk said. “And as you can imagine, this charter did not contain anything that would have really transformed how companies did business. … But it paid a lot of lip service to the idea of going green, and because they got out in front of the actual conference, they were really able to put that document forward and stave off other kinds of more binding legislation.”

The GCC worked to steer the Conference of the Parties and the IPCC in this direction as well. Many of the source documents Brulle cites in his paper, including Harrison’s 1994-1995 communications plan for the GCC, show this strategy explicitly. “The economic consequences of future actions by the COP are likely to attract more attention than statements about scientific uncertainties,” Harrison’s plan reads. “Especially if the economic stakes can be made apparent to ‘people on Main Street.’”It goes on to lay out specific messages that GCC members should emphasize to the press, politicians, and the public, including: “Voluntary programs for reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions are allowing industry to balance economics and environmental performance without impairing competitiveness.”

What’s also painfully obvious in these documents is just how close the international process came to forcing action on climate in the 1990s — the decade in which it would have had the most impact. The 1994-95 GCC communications plan shows that the group and the industries it represented were losing the fight and that momentum was building for a binding international treaty that would mandate emissions reductions. “Dozens of U.N. agencies, international organizations and special interest groups are driving events — regardless of economic costs and remaining scientific uncertainties — toward a conclusion inimical to the interests of the GCC and the U.S. economy,” the plan reads.

A few pages later it notes, “The window for influencing U.S. decisions on future U.N. actions is relatively narrow. During the next 18-24 months there will be a number of critical decision points as the Parties to the FCCC advance toward the COP’s 1997 deadline for elaborating new policies and measures.”

The 1997 Conference of the Parties was, of course, when the Kyoto Protocol was introduced; the international agreement mandated emissions reductions for certain countries, something the Clinton administration had already indicated it supported. It was a make-or-break moment for industries concerned about the impact that mandatory emissions reductions would have on their bottom line, and the GCC redoubled its efforts.

First it targeted key U.S. politicians. Working with Sens. Chuck Hagel and Robert Byrd, Brulle writes, the group rounded up support for an amendment to set strict criteria for any international climate accord. “This effort contributed to the passage of the Byrd-Hagel Amendment in July 1997,” Brulle writes. “This amendment required that any climate accord would have to include [emissions] reductions by developing countries and could not result in serious harm to the U.S. economy. These provisions damaged the credibility of the U.S. because it showed a lack of consensus among the different branches of government about an international climate accord.”

That argument stands in stark contrast to the fossil fuel industry’s narrative today, which holds that out-of-touch climate elitists are trying to force emissions reductions on countries that deserve to use fossil fuels to develop. Passage of the Byrd-Hagel amendment was the GCC’s first big victory after its success in shaping the UNFCCC. In the wake of that victory, GCC members poured $13 million into a PR campaign centered on the argument that the international accord would raise gasoline prices and harm the economy. The tag line of the anti-Kyoto campaign was It’s not global and it won’t work.”:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"/maxresdefault.jpg)”

“They get a map of the globe and they start cutting out the countries that don’t have to comply,” Brulle said. “And then they hold up this map with all of these holes in it, and they said, ‘This is unfair. It won’t work and it’s not fair.’ And that’s what they ran on. And guess what? It works! It was very effective. And you still hear that today when folks argue against climate policy by saying, ‘What about China? What about India?’”

The group also commissioned third-party economists and policy analysts to bolster its argument that mandatory emissions cuts would spell death for the American economy. “It was very much, play up the economic impact, play up the threat to the ‘American way of life,’” Brulle said. “When you can attack the science, do that, but always, always play up the economics.”

That’s particularly interesting in the context of recent research in which some of the same economists the GCC hired have admitted that their models were deeply flawed. The paper “Weaponizing Economics,” published last year by Stanford University researcherBen Franta, shows that the economists working for the GCC and other anti-climate policy groups in the 1990s were using models that inflated the cost of climate policy while ignoring entirely the economic benefit of avoiding climate impacts.

Franta found that the same small group of economists was being routinely commissioned not only by the GCC but also the American Petroleum Institute (a founding GCC member)and various conservative think tanks; every time a policy was proposed that would limit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, this same model would get trotted out, and industry spokespeople and politicians would warn that acting on climate change would put companies out of business and cost the average American family thousands of dollars.

“Eventually their analyses became conventional wisdom,” Franta said. “The scientific merchants of doubt ultimately failed; their power waned. But this, the economics part, their power did not really wane in the same way. And you know, the implications are larger. I mean, it’s a fraudulent economic product. And now we have economists who worked on those models saying, by their own admission, that this analysis that showed it would be too expensive to act on climate is not true. And this has been going on for decades. So now the question is, what do we do about this?”

Brulle’s recent findings make it that much more concerning that the IPCC allowed mentions of obstructionism and vested interests to be scrubbed from its summary for policymakers. “That document was like Star Wars without Darth Vader,” he said. “This research gives us a history of what actually happened. It puts Darth Vader back in the story.”

ref franta weapiniz

aBSTRACT

The role of particular scientists in opposing policies to slow and halt global warming has been extensively documented. The role of economists, however, has received less attention. Here, I trace the history of an influential group of economic consultants hired by the petroleum industry from the 1990s to the 2010s to estimate the costs of various proposed climate policies. The economists used models that inflated predicted costs while ignoring policy benefits, and their results were often portrayed to the public as independent rather than industry-sponsored. Their work played a key role in undermining numerous major climate policy initiatives in the US over a span of decades, including carbon pricing and participation in international climate agreements. This study illustrates how the fossil fuel industry has funded biased economic analyses to oppose climate policy and highlights the need for greater attention on the role of economists and economic paradigms, doctrines, and models in climate policy delay.

1 Introduction

What bothers me is that our analysis just talked about the costs; we didn’t talk about the whole problem of global warming. There are also consequences to doing nothing about climate change. In fact, it looks more and more like there are serious potential consequences of doing nothing.

I believe we conducted sound economic analyses of the costs of reducing emissions … but I regret not being in a position where I could tell what I feel is the whole story.

Numerous industries under regulatory threat have used the language of science to defend their commercial interests. The tobacco industry, under Operation Whitecoat, cultivated and funded a worldwide network of scientists to act as spokespeople and convince the public that the harms of cigarettes remained unproved (U.S. v. Philip Morris USA, Inc.,  2006). The lead industry supported Harvard professor Joseph Aub to perform research ignoring the effects of lead on children (Markowitz and Rosner 2002). Chemical companies routinely hire scientific consulting firms such as Exponent, ChemRisk, Ramboll, and Gradient to produce studies disputing the hazards of products for lawmaking and litigation (Michaels 2020).

For some industries, science represents both a danger and an opportunity. Scientists make potent spokespeople, and rhetorical positions ostensibly backed by science are powerful, while misalignments between industry pronouncements and the scientific community can spell trouble. An early handbook written for regulated industries even has among its top recommendations, ‘Coopt the Experts’ (Owen and Braeutigam 1978). The handbook explains (p. 7):

“Regulatory policy is increasingly made with the participation of experts, especially academics. A regulated firm or industry should be prepared whenever possible to coopt these experts. This is most effectively done by identifying the leading experts in each relevant field and hiring them as consultants or advisors, or giving them research grants and the like. This activity requires a modicum of finesse; it must not be too blatant, for the experts themselves must not recognize that they have lost their objectivity and freedom of action. At a minimum, a program of this kind reduces the threat that the leading experts will be available to testify or write against the interests of the regulated firms. AT&T has made a major investment, for instance, in very high grade economic talent over the past decade. It is not entirely accidental that this group of economists has produced a formidable new theory of multiproduct natural monopoly that may serve as a powerful argument in favor of barriers to entry and the exclusion of competitors in AT&T markets.”

Economists, as the above quote indicates, are particularly relevant to industry efforts to influence regulation. In the context of climate change politics, much as been written about the use of scientists, often supported by fossil fuel or other antiregulatory interests, as spokespeople for policy delay (Oreskes and Conway 2011). Yet less attention has been paid to the role of economists.

By the early 1980s, at least some economists were already counteracting calls for policies that would help prevent and minimize global warming. In 1983, the US National Academy of Sciences published Changing Climate, a report presenting an overview of contemporary climate science and policy thinking (National Research Council 1983). The portions by scientists, for the most part, warned that continued fossil fuel use would have dire consequences. Oceanographer Roger Revelle discussed the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic Sheet, warning that such a development would ‘flood all existing port facilities and other low-lying coastal structures, extensive sections of the heavily farmed and densely populated river deltas of the world … and large areas of many of the world’s major cities’ (p. 442).

The economists, in contrast, counseled against policy action, suggesting that global warming might not be that bad. Thomas Schelling of Harvard University argued that migration and adaptation would be preferable to reducing fossil fuel emissions. ‘It would be wrong to commit ourselves to the principle,’ he wrote, ‘that if fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are where the problem arises, that must also be where the solution lies’ (p. 449). William Nordhaus of Yale University agreed, writing that although a fossil fuel tax would reduce emissions, ‘[t]he strategies suggested … by Schelling … climate modification or simply adaptation to a high CO2 and high temperature world – are likely to be more economical ways of adjusting’ (p. 151). Yet neither economist provided a detailed analysis to support his conclusions.

The report’s summary, written by physicist William Nierenberg, adopted the economists’ position, stating (p. 61–62):

[I]t could be that emissions will be low, or that concentrations will rise slowly, or that climatic effects will be small, or that environmental and societal impacts will be mild … It is probably wiser not to act aggressively to ‘solve the CO2 problem’ right now, when we really do not know the future consequences or context of CO2 increase. In trying to consider the world of 50 or 100 years from now, we cannot be sure that we can tell the difference between solutions and problems.

While the scientists’ warnings were supported by decades of research, the economists’ reassurances were closer to hopeful guesses. Although it was possible that global warming would be less severe than expected, by the same logic it could also be worse. Coastal flooding worldwide would presumably pose a serious problem in any century, and without an understanding of the damage global warming would cause, it was impossible for the economists to know whether adaptation or prevention would be more economical. Yet the economists’ arguments, though speculative, were given credibility by the National Academies report, which was used by the Reagan administration to promote further coal use (Oreskes and Conway 2011, p. 182).

Scientists had been warning of global warming increasingly since the 1950s (Franta 2018), and by the early 1980s, even Exxon privately acknowledged that prompt action would be required to avoid severe damage (Knisely 1979). Despite the scientific consensus, the Changing Climate report demonstrated how economic rhetoric could be used to delay policy action, reflecting a broader trend since the 1970s of industries deploying economic arguments against regulatory efforts (Waterhouse 2014). The year after the report was published, its chairman, William Nierenberg, co-founded the George C. Marshall Institute, which went on to oppose climate policy for decades through a combination of science denial and anti-regulatory economic talking points (Oreskes and Conway 2011).

Thus, as pressure grew in the late 1980s to prevent severe global warming, it may not be surprising that the fossil fuel industry turned to economists to help influence public policy. Important among these economists were those at Charles River Associates, a US-based consulting firm that played a key role in weakening, delaying, or defeating a wide range of climate policies over the following years, including US carbon pricing proposals and international climate agreements. These economic consultants helped convince the public and policymakers that climate policy would be costly, global warming would be relatively unimportant, and there would be little harm in delaying action. Their work was paid for by the fossil fuel industry, a fact often concealed from the public, and their methodologies were incomplete in favor of the industry. Yet their results were only occasionally challenged and eventually formed a significant part of conventional economic thinking.:{2:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: The history of Charles River Associates illustrates how the fossil fuel industry has used biased economic analyses to weaken and defeat climate policy and highlights the need for greater attention on the role of economists and economic paradigms, doctrines, and models in climate policy delay.

2. Carbon pricing in the 1990s

1988 was a key year in the history of global warming politics. Climate scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that anthropogenic global warming was likely underway, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Canadian government sponsored a conference in Toronto calling for worldwide carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced by 20% by 2005 (Bodansky 2001). As Europe and Japan considered carbon taxes to meet the goals of the Toronto conference, the US petroleum industry and Bush administration insisted that climate science was uncertain and that controlling emissions would destroy the economy (Platt’s Oilgram News 1988). Reinforcing the economic argument, in 1991 Bush’s Department of Energy released a report stating that the envisioned 20% reduction in emissions would require a large carbon tax of 500 USD per ton (Bradley et al. 1991). Rather than emissions cuts, the report promoted the administration’s National Energy Strategy, which would allow emissions to grow until at least 2015 and called for the focus to be taken off of the fossil fuel sector....

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/to-us-oligarchs-majority-views-on-taxing-the-rich-count-for-little/

noah b

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent.

At some point, corruption stops being a bug in democracy and starts becoming a feature of oligarchy.

Has the US passed that threshold?

Based on the sweeping and effective resistance to commonsense solutions to reign in wealthy tax scofflaws, the answer is not encouraging.

Since the 1970s, the United States has become steadily and inexorably more economically unequal. According to Pew, upper income families have brought in a larger and larger share of total income.

US income inequality is the highest of all G7 nations. Its Gini coefficient is .434, well above second highest UK at .392.

In 1968, the top 20 percent of households earned 43 percent of national income. By 2018, the top 20 percent of households earned 52 percent.

In 1989, the richest 5 percent of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second poorest income tier. In 2016, they had 248times as much wealth.

In 2020, the 50 richest Americans had almost as much wealth as the poorest half of the US population.

This massive concentration of wealth is also a massive concentration of power. The wealthiest people have access to the best lawyers, the best tax attorneys and the most powerful politicians.

That means that it is very difficult for the government to restrain them, or to create a more equitable economy and society against their wishes.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth. [amp fdbk]

An example of oligarchical power is billionaire tax evasion. A recent IRS study found that wealthy Americans conceal more than 20 percent of their earnings. They are able to do this because of complex accounting scams involving offshore tax shelters.

The lost tax costs the government at least $175 billion a year in revenue. The top 1 percent of earners are responsible for a third of unpaid federal taxes.

In addition to these straightforwardly illegal accounting tricks, the very wealthy also benefit from at least nominally legal loopholes.

For instance, wealthy people have many assets that increase in value over time, but they do not pay taxes on those assets until they sell them.

They can borrow against those assets without paying taxes, since again the assets aren’t considered income. Then, if they die before selling the assets, they can pass them on to their heirs using trusts and other accounting shenanigans to avoid the estate tax.

ProPublica called this strategy Buy, Borrow, Die. It’s a key method for hoarding generational wealth, and entrenching oligarchy.

The Biden administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, have proposed strong measures to rein in billionaire corruption. In part, they want to restrain inequality. In part, they hope to fund other priorities like climate mitigation and anti-poverty measures in the administration’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan.

To address billionaire tax evasion, BBB included $80 billion to boost capacity and staff at the IRS. That would help make up for the steady budget-cuts under Republican administrations. Those have led to a 60 percent decrease in audits of taxpayers who earn more than $1 million. Biden said the investment would allow the IRS to collect $400 billion in taxes.

Biden, Yellen and Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden have also been pushing for a billionaire tax to force the very wealthy to pay taxes on the increased value of their assets.

This would strike at the heart of the oligarchic “Buy, Borrow, Die” lifestyle. It would force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share, like everyone else, every year, year after year.

Policies that prevent the rich from escaping a tax burden everyone has to pay should be easy to pass in a democracy. You’d think preventing billionaires from cheating on their taxes would be a popular policy.

And you’d be correct.

A 2019 poll, for example, showed that 76 percent of Americans agreed that the wealthiest should pay more in taxes. Proposals to tax income over $10 million at 70 percent — a huge increase over current rates — obtained more than 50 percent support.

In an oligarchy, though, public support doesn’t necessarily count for all that much.

A notorious 2015 study found that politicians were much more likely to listen to and follow the political preferences of economic elites than those of the less affluent.

You can see that playing out in the politics of billionaire taxation.

Build Back Better, which included the beefed-up IRS funding, was scuttled by millionaire West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, in large part, reportedly, because he was worried that poor parents would spend money on drugs.

A wealthy politician refused to enforce the law against billionaires because he was worried that poor people are natural criminals.

That is what you call class consciousness.

Wyden’s proposal to end “Buy, Borrow, Die” also failed after opposition from Manchin.It was of course opposed by Senate Republicans, whose main goal is to shovel as much money as possible to the rich in as short a time as possible.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent. This would make it harder for businesses to escape tax burdens by moving their corporate offices. Congress still has to pass the treaty, but Yellen said she was confident they would do so.

The corporate minimum tax is a substantial achievement. But it’s also a small dam erected against the tsunami of inequality in the US.

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

The wealthy have been expanding their power and influence for decades in the US. The result is that the US regularly chooses to make the rich richer rather than helping the poorest feed their children.

The outlook for change is likely to be even bleaker if Republicans recapture one or both legislative chambers in November.

Yellen and Biden are to be commended for fighting an ongoing rearguard action against corruption. But if government inability to restrain corruption is a feature of oligarchy, then the US is already well down a path that it is very difficult to retrace.