Moore, Stephen

===

NO MERRI

SEE TWO BAK AND THREE

See CNP Big Lie

KOCH aspen DONORS CAP FUND RICH FINK GMU MARC BLOCK KANSAS POLICY INST

FAIL CLIMATE COVID

HERITAGE HOOVER

LINDZEN LOMBORG PAT MICHAELS

econ bad trinity trump with kudlow and navarro LAFFER (heritage picks?) VEDDER

promoted to primary 12/13 sorta lost track after that

not sure why he's linked to hackademics, tho he is an ALEC "scholar"

TRUMP energy transition?

trump voodoo tax cut

now col at WT

master of arts from GMU?

~ CAP AND TRADE?

see bak

---

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.’ ”

---

===

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

---

washingtonian mag based on nelson bk:

...The CNP’s second stratagem to “reopen the economy” debuted around the same time. On April 13, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Robert Costa reported that White House staff had presented Trump with a list of “100 business executives” who could advise him as to how to jump-start the economy. The piece quoted CNP co-founder Richard Viguerie, who began his career under the tutelage of disgraced radio evangelist Billy James Hargis and went on to pioneer the use of direct mail in political marketing. “Obviously, the sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans,” Viguerie said. A lot of them, he added, “feel there might be an overreaction to all of this [epidemic].”

According to The Washington Post’s unnamed sources, “The outside effort from conservative groups is expected to be led by Stephen Moore,a conservative at the Heritage Foundation who is close with White House economic officials; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots; Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks,a conservative advocacy organization; andLisa Nelson, chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative pro-business policy and lobbying organization with ties to the Koch brothers.”

This initiative marked a shift in the CNP profile. Going into the 2016 elections, the public faces of the organization had been prominent fundamentalists. Tony Perkins, CNP president from 2016 to 2019, is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister and longtime head of the fundamentalist lobbying group Family Research Council, and he has hosted Christian nationalists Robert Jeffress and David Barton on his radio broadcasts. Almost half of Trump’s original Evangelical Advisory Board—including Perkins—were members of the CNP, and they were in and out of the Oval Office on a regular basis. But in 2019, Perkins was succeeded as CNP president by William Walton, the founder and chairman of Rappahannock Ventures, a private equity firm, with long ties to the Koch Brothers and a limited religious profile. In 2015, Walton chaired a panel at the CNP, stating, “Most of my career has been spent in business and on Wall Street, and I was among the first to attend the Charles Koch seminars.” Other figures connected to the Koch empire ascended in the CNP hierarchy. Jenny Beth Martin, who co-founded the Tea Party Patriots with Koch backing, rose to the office of secretary. Adam Brandon, head of the Koch-founded “grassroots” organization FreedomWorks, took a spot on the board of directors of CNP Action, the organization’s lobbying arm.

David Koch died in August 2019, but his brother Charles carried on. A man with no particular religious profile, Koch embarked on a “charm offensive,” distancing himself from Trump and his fundamentalist allies, presenting himself to the media as a “unifier” (and scrubbing the CNP’s Free Enterprise Award from his profile). But his funding activities told a different story. The Center for Media and Democracy’s Alec Kotch has recorded millions of dollars in grants from Koch and affiliates such as the Donors Trust to organizations run by leading members of the CNP. Theseinclude ALEC, as well as the State Policy Network, the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA. Some of these groups would play important roles in attempts to disrupt the electoral process in the months ahead.

The Washington Post’s April story on the “100 business leaders” initiative made no mention of the CNP, despite the fact that among the leading figures, Moore was on the CNP board of governors, Nelson was a member, and Martin and Brandon were officers. Moore warned the Post that the disaffection of “the right” presented a growing threat to public order, neglecting to mention the ways the CNP was stoking the flames. “There’s a massive movement on the right now, growing exponentially,” he said. “In the next two weeks, you’ll see protests in the streets by conservatives; you’ll see a big pushback against the lockdown in some states. People are at the boiling point.”

The “boiling point” materialized over the next two weeks, as Moore forecast, with the assistance of another CNP-linked effort called Convention of States, led by Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and CNP Gold Circle member.He told the *Post* his group would function as a “clearinghouse where all these guys can find each other” and praised “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.” Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns. “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about the protests across the country.”The most publicized events occurred at the Michigan statehouse on April 15 and May 1, when armed protesters invaded the state Capitol, but these were far from the only ones.

The new “businessmen’s group,” previewed in The Washington Post as “100 business executives,” officially debuted on April 27, billed as the “Save Our Country Coalition.” It called for a series of measures to reopen the economy, flying in the face of expert medical recommendations for curbing the epidemic, whose U.S. death toll now approached 55,000. The CNP was heavily represented among the group’s leadership, including stalwarts such as Richard Viguerie, Ed Meese, and Kenneth Blackwell, as well as rising stars Adam Brandon, Jenny Beth Martin, and Lisa Nelson.

---

===

ALEC Economist Denies Red State Coronavirus Surge Just Hours Before Texas Governor Warns About Spike in Hospitalization

By Arn Pearson and Don Wiener | June 23rd, 2020

Stephen Moore, the leading economist for the corporate lobby front group that has pushed for a rapid reopening of the economy and COVID-19 immunity for employers, denied there’s a growing health crisis in the South and West as the same day Texas Gov. Greg Abbott held a press conference to deal with spiking cases and hospitalizations in Texas.

Search Results

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Trump Economic Adviser Compares Protesters Against ...

www.newsweek.com › ... › Civil rights › Donald Trump

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Protests erupt again over coronavirus shelter-in ... - CNN.com

www.cnn.com › protests-coronavirus-stay-at-home-orders

2 days ago - Anger over shelter-in-place orders boiled over, with protesters ignoring ... with the Tea Party, and Stephen Moore, an economist who President ...

COVID-19 Protesters Just Like Rosa Parks, Says White House ...

www.huffpost.com › entry › stephen-moore-trump-cov...

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:{4 days ago - :{COVID:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-19 :{Protesters:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Just Like Rosa Parks, Says White House Adviser :{Stephen Moore:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. The economic pundit repeatedly made the shocking ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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Rallies against stay-at-home orders grow as Trump sides with ...

www.washingtonpost.com › national › 2020/04/17

5 days ago - Groups demonstrated in at least six states this week, with protests planned in ... and exceeded,” said Stephen Moore, a conservative economist.

Moore Compares Protesters To Rosa Parks | Talking Points ...

talkingpointsmemo.com › News

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:{4 days ago - Trump economic adviser :{Stephen Moore:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: faces backlash for recently comparing :{protesters:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: defying :{stay:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-at-home orders in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to civil ... Trump Hotels Aren't :{Housing:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Healthcare Workers Amid :{COVID:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-19 ... EDITORS' NOTE: TPM is making our :{COVID:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-19 coverage free to all ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: shelter ‎| Must include:shelter

Trump Adviser: Social Distancing Protestors Are the Second ...

www.vanityfair.com › stephen-moore-rosa-parks-protests

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:{2 days ago - :{Stephen Moore:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, who thinks the country should've reopened weeks ago, has ... :{stay:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-at-home orders in order to protect people from a deadly disease, ... the anti-social-distancing, apparently pro-:{COVID:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-19 activists have ... We n:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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Failed Trump nominee Stephen Moore: "If I'm such a scoundrel and a sexist, why did [CNN] have me on every night?":{

May 2, 2019 9:21 PM EDT}:

desperate defense/deflection?

Right-wing outlets like The Wall Street Journal editorial page are touting a deeply flawed new study attacking electric vehicles.
Trump Fed pick Stephen Moore repeatedly said that he liked working at Fox News because he met "a lot of beautiful women" there. Moore has also praised slave-owning Confederate general Robert E. Lee and hates climate science so much that he even attacked Ivanka Trump.
Tucker Carlson's wild new talking point is that abortion is somehow a tool of "corporate" oppression.
A Fox host blamed bank regulation for high tuition and the student loan crisis.

:{==

cmd

Stephen Moore, Trump’s recent appointment to the Federal Reserve Board, has served as the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) leading voice for austerity and anti-labor policies for over a decade.

ALEC is a pay-to-play operation where legislators and corporate lobbyists meet behind closed doors to establish policies on issues that affect our lives, such as the environment, energy policy, and workers’ issues. Moore currently serves on ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Advisory Council” and the Board of Scholars. Since at least 2009, Moore has regularly attended the meetings where corporations script state policy.

Moore’s most well-known work with ALEC, “Rich States, Poor States” (RSPS), is one of the flagship documents supporting a conservative agenda in the states. For twelve years, Moore has co-authored the report, which serves as ALEC’s state scorecard for Koch-backed policies aimed at reducing taxes on the wealthy and corporations and suppressing wages.

ALEC’s RSPS report “provides a recipe for economic inequality, wage suppression, and stagnant incomes,” as well as for austerity for public infrastructure and education systems which “are the true foundations of long term economic growth and shared prosperity,” wrote economist Peter Fisher in a joint Good Jobs First and Iowa Policy Project report.

Moore now faces confirmation by the US Senate, which is expected to be a turbulent process, as he is widely considered unqualified to hold a position that would make him one of America’s most powerful officials for economic policy.

Ties to The American Legislative Exchange Council

Moore has spoken at ALEC conferences every year since at least 2013. He was a featured speaker at ALEC’s; a keynote speaker at the; he “talked ideas and policy” at the; he had a “terrific time with dedicated state legislators” at an ALEC event in 2016; was on an ALEC panel in 2017 and promoted coal at the 2018 ALEC conference and answered questions about RSPS on a panel.

ALEC Moore is one of the “most well-respected free-market economists in America,” while Moore states “it is a great privilege” to be associated with ALEC. “Don’t you just know we are doing the right thing at ALEC, when we have these lunatics protesting against what we are doing?” Moore once said, presumably speaking of the multiple workers’ rights and environmental rights groups that protested the in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Moore’s speaking engagements have predominantly focused on RSPS, which ALEC calls its “economic outlook of states.” Moore is frequently called to ALEC meetings to discuss the yearly report he and his co-authors — ALEC Chief Economist Jonathan Williams and Reagan-alum economist Dr. Arthur B. Laffer — research together.

Expert Reviews of Rich States, Poor States

ALEC’s flagship report has been derided by experts as “silly,” “highly misleading,” and the “gold standard in bogus economic policy claims.” As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported in 2015, RSPC “slaps a fresh coat of paint on the flawed fiscal and economic austerity policies favored by the group and its corporate patrons.”

Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reviewed ALEC’s RSPS reports and concluded that the data did not back-up ALEC’s claims. The “bottom line,” according to Chinn’s findings, is that the ALEC rankings are “not correlated with real [gross state product] growth, either short term or media term.”

Chinn told CMD that the conclusions of the 2015 econometric assessment are still likely true today and that he agrees with the conclusions of Good Jobs First and the Iowa Policy Project in their 2012 report on ALEC’s deeply flawed methodology. According to that report, “Selling Snake Oil to the States,” ALEC’s RSPS “consistently ignores decades of published research making broad, unsubstantiated claims and often using anecdotes or spurious two-factor correlations that fail to control for obviously relevant factors.” RSPS relies on a “methodologically primitive analysis that any student taking Statistics 101 would be taught to avoid,” the report concluded.

Moore often uses migration numbers as people “voting with their feet” as evidence for their economic policy preferences. But Chinn says that this method of analysis is fraught as it does not control for many factors at play. Marshall Steinbaum, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, called Moore’s premise of people moving from blue states to red states .”

RSPS “embodies the policy agenda that ALEC pushes to state legislators” according to the Iowa Policy Project’s “Grading of the States.” That site was created by Fisher, an economist who is currently the Research Director at Iowa Policy Project, to cover business climate rankings. Grading of the States says despite ALEC’s claims that “these policies promote economic growth and prosperity, the evidence shows otherwise.”

Kansas is one data point of the evidence Grading of the States mentions. As CMD reported in 2016, ALEC-backed policies in Kansas have resulted in a widening of the income inequality gap “by shifting income to the state’s wealthiest taxpayers and corporations, while suppressing wages and cutting services for the middle class, low-income children, and veterans.”

Moore’s Background

Despite praise from ALEC claiming “no one is more qualified than Stephen Moore for this position,” Stephen Moore would be alone on the Federal Reserve Board as the only member without a doctorate degree. Moore has never worked within academia. And, as pointed out by Chinn, Moore has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Instead, Moore has climbed the ranks within conservative think-tanks and political groups. He founded Club for Growth, and has worked as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a senior economic contributor at FreedomWorks, a board member of the Donors Capital Fund, a research director for President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Privatization, and with many other right-wing organizations.

“Stephen Moore is little more than a fairly inept polemicist. I’ve never seen anything written by him that could be construed as ‘research’ in an academic/policy sense,” Chinn told CMD. Pointing at his lack of a doctorate in the field, Chinn opined, “perhaps he has an excuse, given his limited economics training,” but Moore’s “use of incorrect or outdated data suggests deeper issues.”

Economists Say Moore Is Not Qualified

Moore “is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad pick. He hasn’t gotten a thing right in twenty years,” Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, tweeted.

Wolfers is not alone. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush and is considered a “leading Republican economist,” said Moore “does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job.”

Moore himself said, “I’m kind of new to this game, frankly, so I’m going to be on a steep learning curve myself about how the Fed operates, how the Federal Reserve makes its decisions,” according to Bloomberg. “It’s hard for me to say even what my role will be there, assuming I get confirmed.”

Trump also recently appointed “former pizza magnate turned failed Republican presidential candidate” Herman Cain to the Fed. However, according to ABC News, Cain is expected to withdraw his name from consideration in the coming days after four GOP senators indicated they would not vote to confirm him. The next step in the confirmation process is vetting from the Senate Committee on Banking, chaired by Idaho Republican Mike Crapo.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/28/trumps-fed-pick-stephen-moore-owes-75000-in-taxes-government-says.html

75K in taxes

...Moore believes the central bank should cut interest rates by half a percentage point, a position well out of line with other policymakers.

In an interview with the New York Times on Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation fellow and former Wall Street Journal editorial board member backed off earlier criticism he had for the Fed and specifically its chairman, Jerome Powell.

Shortly after the Fed enacted its fourth rate hike of 2018 in December, Moore wrote in a Heritage blog post entitled "Fire the Fed" that Powell should "do the honorable thing ... and resign."

The lien was first reported by The Guardian.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/that-grifty-thing-stephen-moore-did-with-herman-cain-and-the-koch-brothers-blessing/

That Grifty Thing Stephen Moore Did With Herman Cain—and the Koch Brothers’ Blessing

ByAdele M. Stan | April 30, 2019

In 2010, longtime GOP political operative Mark Block, together with strategist Linda Hansen, approached Herman Cain, then a retired pizza-chain magnate, with an idea for a for-profit enterprise designed to scare employees of privately-held companies into voting for their employers’ favored candidates: Herd them into the break room, give them a seminar about the evils of government, social services and labor unions, and then register them to vote.

According to Hansen, “when Herman [Cain] first heard the concept here, he said, ‘You’ve come up with the answer to ACORN!’” She was referring, of course, to the now-defunct organizing group that was felled by dirty trickster James O’Keefe, whose Project Veritas receives much of its fundingthrough the network of donors built by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. For gravitas of a certain fashion, Stephen Moore, then on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, was pulled in.

Today, Moore awaits his nomination to the Federal Reserve by President Donald Trump, who really wanted to get the band back together when he mentioned both Moore and Cain as his picks to the central bank. But if Moore passes muster—which is looking less likely by the hour—he’ll have to go on without his sideman, seeing as new sexual harassment allegations against Cain led to a rare rebuke of the president by Republican senators, four of whom said they would not confirm Cain if he were nominated. It remains to be seen whether Moore will survive to confirmation after a litany of misogynist comments surfaced in his past writings for National Review.

[chart from Stephen Moore’s chapter in Prosperity 101™, the textbook for workplace seminars he presented with Herman Cain.

In 2011, I broke the story ofProsperity 101, as Hansen called her enterprise, for AlterNet and The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Here’s a synopsis of my findings.

At the time, Block was racking up points with the Kochs as he built the Wisconsin chapter of their flagship group, Americans for Prosperity, into a political powerhouse that would go on to create the momentum that brought former Gov. Scott Walker and current U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson to power. Hansen, meanwhile, was executive director of an umbrella group of right-wing non-profits conceived by Block, the Wisconsin Prosperity Network. (Block and Hansen went on to manage Cain’s presidential campaign, with Block starring in the Cain campaign’s famous “smoking man” ad ./maxresdefault.jpg).)

After recruiting Cain as a pitchman, Block and Hansen sought a more establishment sort of frontman to join him on the hustings, someone who would be perceived to have real economic expertise. They found one in Stephen Moore, an editorial writer at the nation’s premiere financial newspaper.

Moore was already a regular on the Koch-group speaking circuit, appearing regularly at Americans for Prosperity Foundation events—for which he was paid handsomely. At the time I reported the story, Moore confirmed that he had been paid somewhere between $180,000 – $200,000 for (as tallied at the time of my 2011 report) his 24 appearances at Americans for Prosperity events.

Long before Donald Trump paraphrased it, Moore was uttering a refrain that was music to his benefactors’ ears: Global warming, he said, “was the greatest hoax of the last 100 years.”

Although both Hansen and Moore contended at the time of my report that Moore was not compensated for his appearances at their Prosperity 101 workplace seminars, it bears noting that Hansen was permitted to trade on the Americans for Prosperity name with her for-profit business, and was given a breakout session at an Americans for Prosperity Foundation conference to sell it. And Moore likely wanted to please his paymasters–both the Kochs and Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns the Wall Street Journal. (News Corp. outlets frequently march in lockstep with the political enterprises of the Kochs.)

It worked like this: For a fee, Moore or Cain would come to a workplace you owned to put on a “voluntary” employee seminar on what was ostensibly good for workers economically—which coincidentally happened to be what was far better for very rich people who didn’t want to pay taxes, observe environmental protections or engage in collective bargaining. I found that all of the businesses involved were privately-owned companies whose principals belonged to the Koch donor network.

The most notorious among them was Menards, a chain of home-improvement stores based in the Midwest, whose owner, John Menard, is known for abusing his workers and putting toxic waste, including chromium and arsenic, from his businesses out for pickup with his own household trash. That little trick earned him a $1.7 million fine. (More about the horrors of Menards here.)

But even if you lay aside the grifting, the misogyny and his contempt for government—and please don’t!—Moore’s lack of expertise in, well anything, but especially economics, along with his propensity to just make stuff up (a Trump man through and through), should be disqualification enough.

Here’s an excerpt from my 2011 report, highlighting Moore’s contribution to the “Prosperity 101™” textbook:

In “The Keys to Prosperity,” Moore’s chapter in the Prosperity 101™textbook, he offers up a series of charts, some of them indecipherable, including a pie chart called “Where Your Federal Tax Dollar Goes.” (It’s apparently derived from an earlier presentation Moore made at an AFP Foundation event, the same charts can be found here; scroll to slide no. 16 for this one.) Citing such official sources as the Internal Revenue Service, the Government Accountability Office, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it features eight slices labeled “Flushed Down a Toilet, ”Pissed Away,“ ”Down a Rat Hole,“ ”Sleaze,“ ”Corruption,“ ”Given to ‘Supporters,’“ ”Tossed Down the Drain,“ and ”Postage Stamps.“ (The latter, Moore baselessly contends, accounts for 6 percent of your tax dollars — which is, incidentally, six times the allotment for non-military foreign aid.)

So, there’s your Stephen Moore, economist, right there. We know what happened to Herman Cain. Linda Hansen, meanwhile, is still selling her “Prosperity 101™” books on Amazon. And Mark Block? According to Carole Cadwalladr, writing for The Guardian, he’s the guy who introduced Steve Bannon to SCL Group, which became Cambridge Analytica, thanks to a major investment by Bannon patron Robert Mercer, who installed Bannon as executive vice president. After a beta test pushing the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, armed with a cache of ill-gotten Facebook data, surreptitiously entered the 2016 presidential campaign. And the rest is history.

The band may not be quite back together, but its former members are all singing the same song.

Tags: Charles koch David Koch Herman Cain Koch brothers Linda Hansen Mark Block Rupert Murdoch Stephen Moore Americans for Prosperity Americans for Prosperity Foundation Prosperity 101 Wall Street Journal Wisconsin Prosperity Network

omg

Fellows from conservative think tanks were given the courtesy of lengthy interviews. Morning Edition (5/15/18) dedicated an entire segment to Arthur Brooks’ opinions on the political climate when he stepped down as the president of the American Enterprise Institute. Likewise,Stephen Moore from the Heritage Foundation gave interviews in three segments,and two fellows from CSIS were each given their own interview. Only once did a left-of-center think tank receive similar attention, when NPR‘s Steve Inskeep (4/13/18) interviewed Ruy Teixeira with the liberal Center for American Progress.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/trumps-pick-for-the-fed-admits-he-doesnt-know-how-the-fed-works/

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced he will be nominating Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, sparking an outcry from economists who consider him overtly partisan and unqualified for the role.

And according to Bloomberg News, Moore hardly pushed back on the notion that he was unsuited to govern one of the most powerful economic institutions in the United States:

“I’m kind of new to this game, frankly, so I’m going to be on a steep learning curve myself about how the Fed operates, how the Federal Reserve makes its decisions,” Moore, 59, said on BTV. “It’s hard for me to say even what my role will be there, assuming I get confirmed.”

He also tweeted on Friday, thanking Trump “for the opportunity to serve & for your zealous commitment to freeing the American economic engine from government overreach & oppressive taxation!”

Moore’s admission that he will have to learn as he goes how the Fed works is not confidence-inspiring. Nor is his apparent belief that he could use his position at the Fed to “free” the economy from “oppressive taxation” — the Fed doesn’t control tax rates, it controls interest rates, and it technically doesn’t even directly do that.

Indeed, Moore does not have the typical qualifications of a Fed appointee, the vast majority of whom have a PhD in economics. Moore has a Master of Arts degree from the famously right-wing George Mason Universityand served as a fellow at the also famously right-wing Heritage Foundation. He has advised several GOP campaigns, including Trump’s, and co-wrote a book with conservative economist Art Laffer titled “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.”

Moore is a proponent of supply-side economics, the theory that tax breaks for billionaires and corporations will increase investment and production to the point that prices fall for everyone else — which has broadly failed but nonetheless forms the backbone of the Republican Party’s economic agenda.As a pundit, he has made some spectacularly wrong predictions, like that the U.S. was risking hyperinflation during the Obama years and that ACA was increasing the deficit. His errors have had human consequences: he helped craft former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cut plan, which essentially wrecked the state.

The nomination especially makes no sense because Moore has long had it in for Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman Trump appointed in 2017 because he was taller than then-Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen (yes, really). Ironically, after Moore spent years warning that hyperinflation was right around the corner under Obama, he has since made a 180-degree reversal under Trump and claimed that the Fed’s interest rate hikes — the main way they prevent inflation — are to blame for why the GOP’s massive corporate tax cuts aren’t working.

It is safe to assume that if Moore is appointed, he will spend a lot of time fighting with Powell over interest rates, which may actually be the point. Trump has increasingly suffered buyer’s remorse on his Fed chairman, raging that Powell isn’t doing enough to boost spending. Which would be all well and good if Moore knew what he was talking about. But as even he now seems to be admitting, he doesn’t.

ah, the gift that keeps giving:

the other one has orcs

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/trumps-new-fed-pick-actually-said-that-ayn-rands-atlas-shrugged-was-a-road-map-to-respond-to-the-2008-financial-crisis/

When reports broke that President Donald Trump had picked Stephen Moore to serve at the Federal Reserve, the backlash was swift and severe.

Moore is best known for being an economic analyst who is terrible at his job. Jonathan Chait called him a “famous idiot.” Economist Greg Makiw, one of the most venerated conservative economists, said he “does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job.” Catherine Rampell humiliated him in a debate about deflation.

But one point in Moore’s unimpressive history is a piece he wrote in early January of 2009, in the depths of the financial crisis that began in 2008.

In this perilous time, with the United States facing financial disaster and the world economy staring over the edge of a cliff, Moore advised policymakers to turn to a book at the center of his worldview: Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

It’s not a historical analysis of past recessions or a methodical examination on various economic theories of boom and bust cycles. Instead, it’s a far-right melodramatic novel, a favorite of libertarian extremists, that paints the government as incompetent and a few select entrepreneurs as all-knowing titans.

It provides no actual insights about how the government might mitigate a recession, and Moore is unable to extract any real guidance from its pages in his op-ed, aside from perhaps abolishing all income taxes (!?). But nevertheless, he writes, “If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.”[sic]

This isn’t meaningful analysis or actionable policy guidance — it’s ideological mouth noise designed to impress the uninformed.

In one bizarre passage, he analogizes Rand’s story of an innovative metal inventor having his discovery co-opted by the government to the Treasury secretary pressuring banks to accept bailouts at the cost of giving the United States a financial stake. These instances couldn’t be more different — the government seizing rights to an invention versus taking partial control of banks while providing bailouts to prevent financial catastrophe. A catastrophe driven, in part, by wildly reckless banking practices. And despite Moore’s implications, the actions taken during the recession, whatever their wisdom, didn’t lead the government to keep seizing control of banks — it backed off once the crisis was averted.

The Fed, under the leadership of Chair Ben Bernanke, played a key role in the efforts to respond to the 2008 recession. There are good arguments that it could and should have done more, but those counterfactuals will always be difficult to prove.

But Moore’s view at the time appears to have been that the government should have just stood back and watched as the world burned. And he based this view, of all things, on an absurd novel written by a non-economist.

Now, Trump thinks he should have a say in U.S. monetary policy.

facts wrong

https://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/stephen_moore_heritage_foundation_paul_krugman_kansas_city_star.php

auditioned in wsj by trash fed chair?

only one vote of 12

Trump announced that he is naming Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve Board. Moore is a hack who has been repeatedly proven to be sloppy and dishonest.

While there are left-leaning and right-leaning economists, Moore is manifestly unqualified for this position. An editor atThe Kansas City Staronce vowedto never publish Moore again after his analysis required a lengthy correction. And that was not an isolated incident,either. Every indication is that Moore at the Fed will do whatever best benefits Republican politics at the moment. One key tell at his dishonesty is that Moore has longpushed climate change is a lie. He's also been wildly wrong about Obamacare.

CNN had a role in this farce as well. CNN hired him away from Fox after Trump's election, even though Moore by then had a well-established reputation as a fraud. That continued on CNN, where he was repeatedly corrected on the air. But Trump so loved Moore's devotion to the Trump line on CNN that he wanted to appoint him to a prestigious position.

omg fox ppl staff djt

old whore and bldgs?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/unable-even-to-get-basic-facts-right-paul-krugman-tears-into-the-hack-economist-trump-wants-to-appoint-to-the-fed/

Trump plans to appoint right-wing “economist” Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve Board, and people who know anything about actual economics (and basic factual reporting) are livid.

Moore, a fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, is best known for appearing on TV, talking about the economy, and completely botching his facts.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist for the New York Times, lambasted the nomination of Moore, whom he has sparred with many times in the past.

“Moore isn’t just a hack, with terrible judgment,” Krugman said on Twitter. “He’s a hack who has repeatedly shown himself unable even to get basic facts right.”

Binyamin Applebaum, another Times columnist, noted that Moore once “got so many facts wrong that the Kansas City Star’s editorial page editor vowed never to publish his work again.”

Indeed, he wrote a column trying to argue that low-tax states do better than high tax states, and he included this error-ridden passage:

No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years; California, with its 13 percent tax rate, managed to lose jobs. Oops. Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. Oops.

In fact, as Kansas City Star columnist Yael Abouhalkah pointed out, in addition to choosing a particularly problematic time period to make this judgment, his numbers were just wrong:

Texas did not gain 1 million jobs in the 2007-2012 period Moore measured. The correct figure was a gain of 497,400 jobs.

Florida did not add hundreds of thousands of jobs in that span. It actually lost 461,500 jobs.

New York, with [its] very high income tax rates, did not lose jobs during that time. It gained 75,900 jobs.

Miriam Pepper, an editor of the Kansas City Star, told the Columbia Journalism Review after the incident that his errors were so egregious that she “won’t be running anything else from Stephen Moore.”

Krugman noted that, in addition to this spectacular mistake, Moore was completely unrepentant when his predictions about Kansas’ tax cuts were refuted.

“He made a bad prediction, which happens — but refused to learn from the error, falsified facts, and doubled down on his doctrine,” said Krugman.

Need more convincing? Here he is getting the budget deficit — a simple government accounting measure — completely wrong. Here he is completely botching the facts about the Reagan tax cuts. Here he is making up facts on CNN.

After spending much of his career shilling for the GOP, Moore has since become completely bought-in to Trump’s takeover of the party. Proving he’ll do anything to stay in the good graces of the Republican Party, the Heritage Foundation fellow wrote a book called “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy” lavishly praising the president’s policies, despite increasing evidence that the White House’s boasting is baseless.

Which is just to say, given his record of repeating disgrace, he seems to have the perfect resume to appeal to a president who lives in the world of “alternative facts.”

bk bs

Donald Trump promised the American people a transformative change in economic policy after eight years of stagnation under Obama. But he didn’t adopt a conventional left or right economic agenda. ...Google Books

Originally published: October 30, 2018

Authors: Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore

Review

"Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer, two very talented men, have just completed an incredible book on my Economic Policies, or, as they call it, TRUMPONOMICS. They have really done a great job in capturing my long-held views and ideas. This book is on sale now―a terrific read of a really interesting subject!" ―President Donald Trump

About the Author

Stephen Moore and Arthur B. Laffer are the economists behind the job creation platform that brought Trump to victory. Stephen Moore is a former member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and the Distinguished Visiting Fellow for The Heritage Foundation's Project for Economic Growth. Arthur B. Laffer, the Father of Supply-Side Economics, was a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board. Moore and Laffer are coauthors of Trumponomics.

Product details

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: All Points Books (October 30, 2018)

rev ny mag

chait j

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/trumponomics-book-trump-tax-cuts-rich-deficits.html

Trumponomics is a damning exposé of the corrupt bargain between Donald Trump and the party’s wealthy insiders. The odd thing is that the book is not intended as an exposé at all, but as an auto-hagiography written by three Republican policy entrepreneurs who helped win Trump over and shape his program, and are so lacking in self-awareness that they earnestly believe they are defending both Trump and his partners.

The authors of Trumponomics are Larry Kudlow (who left in the middle of its writing to accept a job as director of the National Economic Council), Stephen Moore, and Arthur Laffer. The three fervently propound supply-side economics, a doctrine that holds that economic performance hinges largely on maintaining low tax rates on the rich. In the 1990s, the supply-siders insisted Bill Clinton’s increase in the top tax rate would create a recession and cause revenue to plummet. The following decade, they heralded the Bush tax cuts as the elixir that had brought in a glorious new era of prosperity. Moore wrote *Bullish on Bush*: How George Bush’s Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger, and Kudlow wrote the foreward to *The Bush Boom*.

Their record of being wrong about everything is so incomprehensibly vast it is astonishing they have retained their positions of influence over a major party. Trumponomics inadvertently clarifies how an economist who was declaring the U.S. housing market to be perfectly sound and on its way up in July 2008 secured a job as chief economist to the president of the United States as a matter of course.

The supply-siders have maintained absolute faith in their dogma in the face of repeated failure by banishing all doubt. Laffer explains in the book that he believes economists must resist the temptation to “start ignoring simple truths in favor of complex falsehoods.” When I first encountered that sentence I assumed I had read it backwards, but no — Laffer believes on principle that economic truths are simple, and he must steel his brain against the seductions of complexity, which is rather the opposite of how normal economists think. This seems to be the method by which they have warded off all doubts their repeated errors might have sown.

Accordingly, they have confined their failed predictions to the memory hole. A brief economic history in Trumponomics touts the gains made from 1982 to 1999, and laments “those gains stalled out after 2000 under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.” Notice, in addition to starting the Reagan era in 1982, thus absolving him for any blame for the recession that began a year into his presidency, they have retroactively moved the hated leftist Bill Clinton into the right-wing hero camp and the beloved conservative hero George W. Bush into the failed left-wing statist camp. At no point do they acknowledge the contemporaneous arguments they made against Clinton or for Bush. This is a preview of the method they will one day use with regard to Trump if the economy fails to deliver on their predictions: They will dismiss him as a leftist in disguise, without ever admitting having endorsed or designed his program.

The extraordinary lack of self-awareness allows the authors of Trumponomics to record a series of predictions that have already failed even before the book’s publication. Describing their case for a huge tax cut, they recount convincing Republicans in Congress that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent “would yield about the same revenue – and possibly more — than the current system with a 35 percent rate.” (It hasn’t — corporate tax revenue has fallen by a third since the passage of the Trump tax cut.) They show Kudlow assuring Trump his tax cut would not lead to deficits because “the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters” are “always wrong.” (They weren’t wrong — or, to put it more precisely, the bean counters turned out to underestimate the deficit following the tax cut.)

They describe Trump demanding, “I want to make sure that this isn’t a tax cut for rich people like me” (it was) and that Trump “didn’t want the Trump middle-class voters to think that this plan was self-serving” (they did.) The three record that, after meeting the great man and noticing his skeletal campaign staff, supposedly for money-saving reasons, they marveled to each other that President Trump “would have a field day going through the federal budget and rooting out the rampant waste, fraud and redundancy.” (He wouldn’t.)

The three authors proudly retell their litany of errors with the satisfaction of conquering heroes taking credit for their triumphs. It’s as if Robert McNamara published a book in 1968 boasting of his successful efforts to persuade Lyndon Johnson that the Vietnam War would be won by 1967.

***

Like virtually all members of the Republican Establishment, Kudlow, Moore, and Laffer initially greeted Trump’s candidacy with skepticism. But their hesitation did not center on the candidate’s ignorance, bigotry, irrepressible lying, authoritarian instincts, criminal history, or general viciousness. Instead, they doubted his commitment to the cause of low taxes for the affluent and lax regulation of business. A meeting with Trump easily dispelled these concerns. “He wanted tax cuts. He wanted to deregulate, he wanted to get government out of the way,” they recall. This was all it took. “The three of us saw Trump in a whole new light.”

Their newfound appreciation for Trump quickly bleeds into other attributes. They report one touching episode, in which the candidate agrees to meet a paralyzed teenage fan backstage before a rally. They ask why he didn’t bring the wheelchair-bound boy onstage, a campaign staffer explains that Trump “didn’t want people to think he was exploiting this tragedy for political gain.”

Bear in mind that Trump constantly boasts not only about charitable donations he makes, but also donations he claims to make but doesn’t, and is also the only recorded presidential candidate in history to. While Trump may have had reasons to keep a disabled fan off stage, it seems a little hard to believe either modesty or sensitivity toward the disabled was the motivation. Yet the authors accept the staffer’s flattering explanation purely at face value, calling it “a side of Donald Trump that many people are unaware of.”

Soon they find themselves lavishing Trump with compliments. “When people ask us what Donald Trump is really like in person, the one word we have found best described him was ‘authentic,’” they write of a man who has been described by his own aides as a compulsive liar.

Kudlow, Moore, and Laffer are unusually fixated on tax cuts,but they are merely extreme examples of the entire Republican Establishment, which shared their broad priorities. “The consolidation of the party behind Trump was greatly facilitated by the attractiveness of the Trump tax plan,” they report.

Greed is the glue that holds their story together. A large segment of their narrative consists of Trump turning over control of his agenda to various plutocrats. They tell how they wrote a memo defining the administration’s energy strategy during the transition period, drawing on three sources: oilman Harold Hamm; the Institute for Energy Research (a “partner organization” of the American Energy Alliance, a fossil fuel lobby); and Jack Coleman, an oil and gas lobbyist. They do not report consulting on any information sources not controlled by the fossil fuel industry. They describe a coal executive advising Trump, “if you want to make America great again, put a muzzle on the regulators.” At another meeting, one energy executive suggests natural gas, coal, and nuclear power should each have 30 percent of the power grid, with renewables splitting the remaining 10 percent. “That sounds about right,” Trump replies, “except for the ten percent for renewable energy.”

The authors report that they abandoned the idea of creating a border-adjustment tax because some businesses opposed it. “The business community was completely divided,” they note. “As such, we agreed very early on that the BAT had to go.” Trump himself refused to accept an end to the deductibility of interest payments. “Look, I’ve spent my whole life doing real estate deals,” he tells them, “Every one of them was financed by debt. I hate this idea.” Here they reveal Trump killing a reform solely because it would negatively impact his own business. This scene comes just five pages after they credulously cite Trump promising that the tax cut won’t benefit him personally.

The authors seem oblivious to either the contradiction with Trump’s populist rhetoric, or the general idea that an administration outsourcing policy to wealthy people with a personal stake in the outcome is in any way suboptimal. If these scenes had been ferreted out by investigative reporters instead of blithely repeated by a trio of hagiographers, many of them would be damning exposés you could imagine on the front page of the New York Times or the WashingtonPost.

The bizarre shamelessness of these accounts is explained in part by their belief that Trump’s wealth proves his motives are pure. “We never believed for one moment that [Trump] was in this to further enrich himself. He was already rich,” they reason.

The notion that the rich would never engage in corruption is not a throwaway line, but a bedrock principle the authors have articulated before. “Why shouldn’t the president surround himself with successful people?”Kudlowwrote in 2016. “Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption.” Trumponomics is an unintentionally persuasive argument for the exact opposite conclusion.

rww

UPDATE (11/13/18): Since the publication of this article, the American Priority conference event page has been modified. The QAnon “expert” panel mentioned in this article has been delisted and some listed speakers who frequently spread the conspiracy theory are no longer listed as conference speakers. Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth no longer appears in the lineup; American Priority conference’s Alex Phillips tells Right Wing Watch that Hegseth withdrew due to an unexpected family obligation.

Heritage Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellow Stephen Moore and Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth are scheduled to appear at a conference in Washington, D.C., next month where a panel of believers in the “QAnon” conspiracy theory plan to present. Moore served as an economic adviser to President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The conference wasannounced earlier this year as an alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which Ali Alexander (also known as “Ali Akbar”), one of the original American Priority conference organizers, said neglected the Trump base, despite a CPAC speaker roster that has included administration officials (including the president himself).

Fox News and Heritage Foundation have not answered Right Wing Watch’s requests for comment.

The current agenda page for the American Priority Conference lists as one of its “conference topics” the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, which surmises that President Donald Trump has ordered someone (or a group of people) with top-level federal security clearance to gradually reveal a secret collaboration between Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller to take down a satanic pedophile ring said to span the globe, and allegedly involves top Democratic leaders. Believers of the conspiracy theory, which revolves around an anonymous figure known only as “Q,” who shares via cryptic riddles posted to an image board notorious for child pornography, believe that Trump will eventually subject such top Democrats as Hillary Clinton to military tribunals.

The American Priority event promises “an open panel discussion from Q Experts.” The website does not contain any additional information about the planned panel. Speakers listed on the conference lineup include YouTube personality Jordan Sather, a prominent producer of QAnon content on YouTube.

Sather, who was on Comedy Central as a QAnon conspiracy theorist, uploads content perpetuating the conspiracy theory almost every single day online, where he has nearly 160,000 subscribers on YouTube. Just this morning, Sather [posted](mailto:%3cblockquote%20class=%22twitter-tweet%22%20data-partner=%22tweetdeck%22%3e%3cp%20lang=%22in%22%20dir=%22ltr%22%3eStop%20it.%20Staaahp.%20%3ca%20href=%22https://twitter.com/hashtag/QAnon?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%22%3e%23QAnon%3c/a%3e%20%3ca%20href=%22https://t.co/TNCkjEdeqw%22%3epic.twitter.com/TNCkjEdeqw%3c/a%3e%3c/p%3e—%20Jordan%20Sather%20%28@Jordan_Sather%29%20%3ca%20href=%22https://twitter.com/Jordan_Sather/status/1060562948479868929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%22%3eNovember%208,%202018%3c/a%3e%3c/blockquote%3e) an image to Twitter suggesting that news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had been hospitalized with fractured ribs was part of the QAnon conspiracy theory.[grafic]

Dustin Nemos, another QAnon content producer, is also slated to speak at the conference. Another speaker is Kari Baxter Donovan, who once promoted an apparently Q-themed article at Populist Media, which appears to have been deleted, tweeting its link with the tagline, “Q is for everyone” and the hashtag “#QAnon” hashtag, which she has also used to promote content as recently as November 3.

Another speaker slated for the conference is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted about QAnon on Facebook as recently as November 5. DeAnna Lorraine, who is also appearing at the conference, has tweeted about QAnon, too.

The event also features breakout sessions with other pro-Trump conspiracy theorists including Matt Couch, who’s responsible for spreading lies about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, and Laura Loomer.

The conference is also scheduled to feature presenters known to have had friendly interactions with figures within the white supremacist “alt-right” movement, including,, and Milo Yiannopoulous.

Deputy Director of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA Chris Chmielenski is also slated to speak at the American Priority conference.

Right now, the conference shows only two full sponsors: An entity called American Grassroots Council, Inc., which appears to have only a shell website, and Americans For The Trump Agenda, a project of the United States Public Policy Council, Inc., a 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose principal officer is listed as Emy Delgaudio, an Amway distributor. (Amway is the pyramid-style company founded by Richard DeVos, the late father-in-law of current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.)

This article has been updated for clarity, with a link added to comments by a conference organizer, Ali Alexander, regarding the need for a conference alternative to CPAC. Alex Phillips, who told Right Wing Watch that he is now the “sole owner and organizer” of the American Priority conference, said that Alexander left the project in August.

Tags: Pete Hegseth Stephen Moore conspiracy theories The Storm Fox News Channel Heritage Foundation

Here’s a brief history of things that paid CNN commentators have said on-air since the inauguration:

Stephen Moore made a completely false claim about coal jobs that an actual economist immediately corrected. (3/29/17)

Jason Miller made sexist remarks about Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), calling her “hysterical.” (6/13/17)

After Trump encouraged police brutality, Jeffrey Lord dismissed it as a "New Yorker sense of humor." (7/31/17)

Lord called Trump “the Martin Luther King of health care.” CNN then talked about it for an entire day. (4/13/17)

Lord compared the Congressional Black Caucus to the KKK. (2/16/17)

Ben Ferguson criticized civil rights icon John Lewis for not educating Trump about civil rights. (12/8/17)

Rick Santorum said that Parkland school shooting survivors aren't taking personal responsibility and should learn CPR instead of engaging in activism. (3/25/18)

Kayleigh McEnany attacked Barack Obama for golfing in 2002 when George W. Bush was president. (3/28/17)

Ken Cuccinelli told panelist Symone Sanders to shut up while discussing white supremacists in Charlottesville. (8/14/17)

Paris Dennard posited that Trump was better than Obama at calling out white supremacists. (8/14/17)

Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump’s sexist remarks to an Irish reporter: "The press should be applauding the fact that he's bringing reporters into the Oval Office, calling them out and including them." (6/28/17)

Rick Santorum attacked reporters for asking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for details about North Korea and nuclear weapons. (6/14/18)

Miller dismissed reports that Trump had an affair with adult actor Stormy Daniels and paid her hush money because, according to him, the alleged payoff was nothing to a billionaire. (3/7/18)

Santorum accused Obama of exacerbating racism in America. (6/3/18)

After a suicide bombing killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert, Lord said that it would be fair for Trump to criticize Grande for not providing enough security. (6/5/17)

Lord used a Nazi analogy to attack London Mayor Sadiq Khan. (6/5/17)

Stephen Moore repeatedly lied about the Affordable Care Act, often without CNN fact-checking him. (7/17/17)

After Roy Moore was accused of child molestation, Stephen Moore argued that his opponent was “no saint either” because he supported abortion. (11/20/17)

Jack Kingston pushed a conspiracy theory that shadowy forces were behind the rally against gun violence organized by Parkland survivors. (2/20/18)

While discussing sexual harassment, Stephen Moore said that he would never take a one-on-one meeting with a woman. (10/23/17)

Jack Kingston said that Bill O'Reilly's racist remarks about Waters' hair were just like liberals calling Trump “orange.” (3/29/17)

Bryan Lanza argued that discussing sexual assault allegations against Trump "seems like a waste of time." (12/20/17)

And it’s not only the paid commentators who are a part of CNN's “false equivalency” problem. Just last week, after Lewandowski mocked a 10-year-old with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother at the U.S. border, CNN invited him on to talk more about his remark.

laffer sidekick, BS chile miracle, lives on in

houst chron

Shiny SUVs and sleek sports cars spilled out of the River OaksCountry Club's parking lots on Thursday, lining the streets for blocks around Houston's most elite gathering spot. The draw: A talk by Arthur Laffer, the Reagan administration economist who is perhaps more strongly associated with the idea that tax cuts foster growth than anyone else.

Laffer is feeling pretty chipper these days. Back in July, when most pundits still considered Donald Trump a long shot for the presidency, Laffer put out a paper predicting he would win. It might have looked like wishful thinking: Trump's tax plans hewed closely towhat Laffer has recommended for decades.

But Trump did win, and now trickle-down economics is back in the White House.Close Laffer associates Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow are among Trump's trusted advisors.Laffer sees a lot of parallels between Trump and Ronald Reagan, whose own long-shot election he rehashed in detail.

===...

presumably total hypocrisy

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-runs-circles-around-trumps-former-economic-adviser-stephen-moore

CNN hired Stephen Moore, the worst economist in the world, to give economics analysis. The network immediately learned what happens when you give a right-wing stooge airtime when Moore, a former Trump adviser, debuted by immediately undermining the network's own reporting about Trump. Meanwhile, Fox News hosts accidentally gave Trump gushing praisefor President Obama's last job report.

CNN has reportedly poached discredited right-wing economic pundit Stephen Moore from Fox News. Moore spent years at Fox routinely spreading misinformation about the economy during the Obama administration and spent much of 2016 promoting Donald Trump's failed trickle-down policies while serving as his senior economic adviser. The decision to hire the notoriously incompetent Moore shows that the network remains invested in its failed strategy of giving airtime to partisan hacks instead of qualified experts.

According to a January 30 report from Business Insider, Moore described leaving Fox News as “a hard decision” but said that “CNN made a really good offer.” The report noted that Moore joins “other right-leaning journalists and contributors” recently hired by the network, which has been adding new conservative voices since Election Day. The decision to add Moore to its roster reveals CNN to be on a troubling trajectory because, even among professional political hacks and conservative pundits, Moore has distinguished himself for his particularly shoddy work.

Media Mattershas extensively detailed Moore’s terrible track record as an economic analyst for over a decade. Moore has falsely claimed for years that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) forces workers into part-time jobs, he attempted to blame the housing crisis on Bill and Hillary Clinton, he promoted the lie that members of Congress and their staff are “exempt” from the ACA, he supported draconian budget cuts that hurt the economy, and he endorsed Republican attempts to block vital infrastructure spending.

During his tenure as the “chief economist” at the Heritage Foundation, Moore once exaggerated the actual cost estimate of providing unaccompanied minors with access to American public schools by an absurd 63 percent, claiming it would cost $1 billion a year. During a July 2014 dispute with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Moore was caught cherry-picking statistics for an op-ed published by The Kansas City Starto intentionally mislead readers about the relationship between tax cuts and job creation. (The newspaper eventually vowed to stop publishing Moore’s work, which had to be corrected by other outlets as well.)

The examples of Moore being clueless about even the basics of economic policy are legion. For instance, there was the February 19, 2014, interview with CNN in which host Carol Costello stopped Moore’s anti-minimum wage spin dead in its tracks:

[vid]

Moore is so widely discredited that New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait once mocked him for being unable to “find a single true fact” to back up his support for repealing the ACA. Economist Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities chided Moore in a March 2015 column for his “fact-free” endorsement of anti-union “right-to-work” laws, and Krugman once speculated that Moore’s “incompetence is actually desirable” in conservative circles, because “a smart hack might turn honest.”

It is one thing for CNN to add a conservative perspective to its news coverage, but it is another thing entirely to grant more airtime to an incompetent serial misinformer like Steve Moore. CNN viewers are already forced to endure Trump sycophant Jeffrey Lord’s ignorant and bigoted commentary. Adding Moore to the network’s roster proves once again that CNN boss Jeff Zucker learned nothing from his organization’s humiliating relationship with irreconcilable Trump apologist Corey Lewandowski. Viewers deserve to hear analysis from qualified experts, not hacks who will eschew the facts to toe a predictable party line on every issue.

Stephen Moore

In May, Politico reported that Trump tapped Stephen Moore to assist in remaking his tax plan. Moore is currently listed on Trump’s “economic advisory council.”

The Fossil Fuel Connection

In January 2014, Moore became the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that received almost $800,000 from ExxonMobil and millions from the Koch Family Foundations. On September 28, Politico reported that Moore went on leave from the Heritage Foundation through the election, but he is currently listed on the website as a “Distinguished Visiting Fellow.”

In November, Moore completely distorted a NASA scientist’s study about East Antarctic ice to claim it was an “indication” that global warming is “actually not happening.” Moore has also claimed that opposing fracking “is like being against a cure for cancer” because it is “one of the great seismic technological breakthroughs” that is “giving us huge amounts of energy at very low prices.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112016/steve-bannon-trump-white-house-climate-conspiracy

President-elect Donald Trump has famously called climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese, but the man he has chosen as his chief White House strategist advances a far more elaborate conspiracy.

Stephen Bannon has called government support of alternative energy "madness." His conservative website, Breitbart News, relentlessly pursues the idea that global warming is an invention of activists, university researchers and renewable energy industry profiteers determined to assert global governance for their own gain.

"Pure scum" is how Breitbart News describes the alleged schemers, and the site suggested that the Vatican had been taken over by Marxists after Pope Francis urged the world to protect the environment and slow climate change. Bannon has cited a faked TIME magazine cover, purportedly from the 1970s, as evidence that scientists once thought the world was cooling.

Global warming hoax theories are among a wide range of extremist views that were circulated on the pages of Breitbart News under its executive chairman, Bannon.

The site's at times overtly racist, anti-Semitic and sexist content has prompted many to protest Trump's selection of him for a key post, and one that does not require Senate confirmation. The outcry has come from civil rights advocates, top Democrats and even some Republicans. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate group activity, reported in Aprilthat there had been a noticeable shift at Breitbart to more overt anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist rhetoric, making it, in effect, "the media arm of the alt-right."

"Steve Bannon's appointment should make us very nervous," Sen. Bernie Sanders posted on Twitter. "We're going to tell him and Trump that we will stand together and not be divided up."

There's been less attention to Bannon's denial of climate change science, and the conspiratorial views on clean energy he has promoted via Breitbart. Advocacy against climate change action has been a key aim of a major financial backer of Breitbart, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. He reportedly playeda key role in installing Bannon at the top of the Trump's campaign in an August shake-up. Mercer, a major donor to the Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations that deny climate change, was among the top campaign contributors of the 2016 election. He spent $23.5 million to help elect Trump and other Republican candidates.

With overheated rhetoric and mischaracterization of fact, Breitbart has repeatedly said climate change is a corrupt swindle that is damaging the economy.

"We could be energy independent," Bannon said in a radio interviewhe conducted for Breitbart's radio program on Sirius XM Patriot. "There is an American renaissance, and an industrial renaissance in front of us, if we can just get the government out of our way."

In the interview, which followed Trump's energy speech in May in North Dakota, Bannon was questioning Trump economic adviser, Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, who had just published a book, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy. But the interview gave Bannon a chance to expound on his own views on energy policy and provides a window into the energy policy direction Bannon will push Trump to pursue in the White House.

Bannon, whose new job will involve developing strategy for working with Capitol Hill, is particularly harsh on Republicans in Congress. He criticizes them for agreeing to include support for renewable energy—"much of this nonsense"—in the omnibus budget bill passed at the end of 2015. (The legislation extended multi-year tax incentives for wind and solar generation as part of a deal that also lifted the 40-year-old ban on U.S. crude oil exports.)

"Whether you believe in alternative energy or not, one thing we can tell you for a fact—whether it works or not, that's all to be seen in the progress of time—it's up to its neck in crony capitalism," said Bannon. "The venture capital guys getting bailed out, the private equity guys getting bailed out, subsidies for these things.

"Why [have] the Republicans not had a more full-throated saying, 'No, we're just going to shut this stuff down. We don't care if the president vetoes it or not, but we're not going to fund this continual madness?'

"And by the way it is madness, at least according to your book, this alternative energy which really tries to compete with dollars for fossil fuel," Bannon said to Moore.

Moore countered by saying, "I'm not against renewable energy. I'm just against taxpayer subsidies."

In fact, worldwidesubsidies for fossil fuels are currently $493 billion, more than four times more than those for renewable energy, according to the International Energy Agency. In the United States, current direct budget subsidiesfor renewable energy are larger than those for fossil fuels, but oil, gas, and coal continue to receive $3.4 billion annually and benefit from decades of taxpayer subsidies, including those that led to an electric grid reliant on centralized, mainly fossil-fueled power.

In one attempt to quantify the subsidy advantage fossil fuels have enjoyed,DBL Investorsestimates that the cumulative value of federal subsidies for oil and gas have totaled $447 billion since 1918, compared to the $6 billion in subsidies for renewables since 1994.

Bannon introduced Moore, who is a Trump adviser, as "one of the great economic thinkers of our day." Moore's book, which urges allowing the energy to build the pipelines it wants to build, opening up public lands to drilling, and putting restraints on the Environmental Protection Agency, lays out "the case for what the country has to do," said Bannon. Moore argued EPA's regulations "are intentionally designed to shut down our domestic energy industry."

Bannon also asked Moore to weigh in on what he called "the globalists" who designed the Paris treaty on climate change. "None of these countries are going to abide by the Paris accord, just like they didn't abide by the Kyoto treaty," said Moore. He added he did not believe in climate change, and remembered that in the 1970s, scientists thought the Earth was cooling.

"TIME magazine had the cover, 'The Next Ice Age,'" said Bannon, laughing. (In fact, a photoshopped TIME cover that has circulated widely on the Internet is a fake. The emerging consensus of atmospheric scientists in the 1970s was that increasing carbon dioxide did pose a warming risk, despite a nine-paragraph Newsweek storyin 1975 on some climatologists' calculation of a cooling trend. Scientific studies since then have shown that soot and aerosolswere responsible for cooling, and that greenhouse gas-driven warming has overwhelmed that trend.)

After Pope Francis issued his encyclical on climate change and the environment, "Laudato Si" last year, Breitbart broadcast on its Sirius XM radio program an interview with one of the world's most prominent climate deniers, Lord Christopher Monckton, headlined, "Climate Expert: Marxists, Global Warming Extremists Control Vatican."

After the Paris climate accord last December, Breitbart News criticized negotiators' design of the agreement to avoid the need for Senate ratification (The agreement, legally binding under international law, is based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992.) " ClimateChange Deal a Threat to U.S. Sovereignty," said the Breitbart headline.

Most coverage and commentary on climate change in Breitbart News is written by the chief of the web site's London operation,James Delingpole,a former columnist for The Daily Telegraph, whom Bannon described as one of the "real hell fighters in the Breitbart tradition" when he appointed him in 2014.

At the start of this year, Delingpole wrote that global warming as an issue "is so totally over," because, among other things, "Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today's temperatures are unusual." The piece ran right after the close of 2015, a year that NASA, NOAA, and the United Kingdom's Met Office agreed was the warmest on record.

Delingpole blames the concept of global warming on "activists and crony capitalists of the political system in order to advance the cause of global governance."

"They are pure scum," he wrote. "They have not a single redeeming quality and everything they do is worthless."

Delingpole has repeatedly called climate change "a $1.5 trillion-a-year conspiracyagainst the taxpayer,"based not on a government (taxpayer) spending figure, but a calculation quoted in Climate Change Business Journal, a market research newsletter, for the size of the clean energy industry.

He calls wind turbines "bird-slicing, bat-chomping eco-crucifixes."

After the election, Delingpole wrote that the only ones who won't benefitfrom Trump's fossil fuel-focused energy plans, are those in the "global warming industry" who, he repeats, are reaping a $1.5 trillion annual windfall. "It's really happening!" he wrote. "The Green Citadel is falling. And I don't know about you but I'm in no particular rush to take prisoners."

Larry Kudlow was part of the Office of Management and Budget in Reagan’s first term, and is now a columnist and on-air personality for CNBC.Trump enlisted Kudlow (along with Stephen Moore) to work on changes to his economic plans.

What You Need To Know

Kudlow was a big supporter of George W. Bush’s economic policies and was infamous for missing the warning signs of the coming economic meltdown.

Kudlow dismissed people concerned about the real estate bubble in the mid-2000s as “bubbleheads who expect housing-price crashes.” In December 2007, as the National Bureau of Economic Research marked the beginning of the Great Recession, Kudlow wrote, “there’s no recession coming.”

Stephen Moore

Conservative economic columnist Stephen Moore was enlisted, along with Larry Kudlow, to tweak Trump’s economic policy in the general election.

Like Kudlow, Moore has a terrible track record when predicting the effect of both conservative and progressive policies on the economy. He also regularly makes false claims to attack policies like taxes, regulation, the minimum wage, and Obamacare.

The editorial page director of the Kansas City Star declared she “won’t be running anything else from Stephen Moore” after he used false employment numbers in a column attacking economist Paul Krugman.

In a column promoting Trump's candidacy, Moore wrote, "It is striking that Trump is the anti-Obama in every way."

eg WT

Happy American Energy Independence Day

The Made in America energy strategy saves money and keeps terrorists at bay

By Stephen Moore - - Sunday, July 3, 2016

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Every president since Richard Nixon has promised to make America energy independent, but we still import 9 million barrels of oil a day with much of it coming from the Middle East and OPEC. Now for the first time in a half century — thanks to the shale oil and gas revolution — the dream of American energy independence is not just a pipe dream but easily achievable if the next president takes the right steps to make it happen.

This Made in America energy strategy means we could stop draining our economy of about $200 billion a year that could be used to rebuild our own country. This isn’t just about the economy. We know from intelligence reports that as much as $500 million a year of petrodollars find their way into the coffers of terrorist networks like ISIS.

To achieve American energy self-sufficiency I’m not talking about theleft’s strange infatuation with building more windmills (sorry Hillary). We only get about 5 percent of our energy from windmills and solar panels.

What I am talking about is about taking the strategic steps necessary to make the United States the energy dominant force on the planet within five to 10 years by using our superabundance of fossil fuel resources. Thanks to the amazing made-in-America technological breakthroughs of the last decade — including horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to get at shale oil and gas reserves — the United States now has at least 150 years of oil and natural gas resources on top of 500 years of coal.See chart.

Consider what has happened in less than a decade with oil production. In 2008 the United States produced about 5 million barrels a day. We hit 8.7 million in 2014[and could double that by 2025.

As we tap into the full potential of our tens of billions of shale oil and gas we can become the number one export nation on the planet. This could easily mean more than $1 trillion a year in oil, gas and also coal exports each year — perhaps exceeding 5 percent of GDP. This would mean as many as 6 million new jobs, according to the Institute for Energy Research

Let’s not forget about coal. America was built on coal, and our nation has far more of it than any other nation. And we burn it cleanly and efficiently, unlike the Chinese and India who build hundreds of coal plants every year, but spew out dirty emissions.

I estimate that with five simple steps taken by the next president, America will gain its energy independence:

1. Allow drilling and mining permits on federal lands. So far at least 90 percent of the shale gas and shale oil revolution has happened on private land. But around half of all the land west of the Mississippi is government owned. We estimate there are $50 trillion of energy resources stored underneath nonenvironmentally sensitive federal lands. This is the biggest treasure chest in the world.

2) Build a national network ofpipelines across the country by allowing the permitting for projects like Keystone XL and many others. Right now the federal government is holding up as many as a dozen necessary pipelines to get the oil and gas across the country and then shipped across the world.

3) Build refineries and liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals in the United States.The Energy Information Agency says the latest refiner “began operating in 1977” — or almost 40 years ago even though the U.S. population has nearly doubled since the mid 1970s and our energy production has doubled as well.

4) Stop the Obama war on coal. The environmentalists have tried to shutdown coal production, the next president should revive it. This means putting a muzzle on the EPA to allow our energy resources to be harnessed and used in an environmentally responsible way. Environmental rules have to be shown to be cost-effective, meaning that the cost to the economy of complying with the rules is justified on the basis of the environmental benefits — and measured honestly.

5) End all subsidies for all forms of energy. The left complains about taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas. The best way to promote efficient energy is to let the free market work and remove government handouts — particularly to the green energy sector.

If we get this right, America can declare its independence fromOPEC and middle eastern oil. We can become the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century.

• Stephen Moore is an economist with Freedom Works and coauthor of“Fueling Freedom: Ending the Mad War on Energy, (Regnery, 2016).

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/3/happy-american-energy-independence-day/

===

regnery

https://www.amazon.com/Fueling-Freedom-Exposing-Mad-Energy/dp/1621574091

http://www.c-span.org/video/?410571-1/stephen-moore-kathleen-white-discuss-fueling-freedom

Stephen Moore and Kathleen White talked about their book, Fueling Freedom, about producing American energy and debunking what they call “myths from the left” about green energy.

Becky Norton Dunlop

Vice President

Heritage Foundation->External Relations

John Edward Hilboldt

Director

Heritage Foundation->Lectures and Seminars

Stephen "Steve" Moore

Senior Fellow

Heritage Foundation

Kathleen White

Director

Texas Public Policy Foundation->Armstrong Center for Energy and Environmen

ina darkened hotel ballroom in Pittsburgh, a middle-aged man with a boyish affect stands before the enthusiastic, if graying, activists of theAmericans For Prosperity Foundation, gathered in August 2009 for its annual RightOnline conference.

"How many people here read the Wall Street Journaleditorial page?" asks Stephen Moore, who sits on the paper's editorial board. The crowd responds boisterously. "What would we do," he continues, "without the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, right? And Americans for Prosperity?"

As the nation's largest-circulation newspaper and the paper of record for the nation's financial sector, the Wall Street Journal occupies a unique place amid the panoply of American news sources, and not only for its influence on the nation's economy. The paper is matched only by Fox News in its unabashed alliance with political advocacy organizations associated with Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers and noted conservative funders who run Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in the United States.

Along with his colleague, John Fund, a columnist for the paper's OpinionJournal Web site, Moore is a frequent and popular speaker at events sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP Foundation). The foundation, which aims to inculcate a right-wing economic agenda among citizen activists, is chaired by David Koch, whose personal wealth is estimated at more than $20 billion. Ubiquitous as pundits on cable news, both Moore and Fund also participate, AlterNet has learned, in a workplace "education" program, Prosperity 101, that is linked to the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a group that mobilizes activists to advocate for policies and politicians who support a pro-business agenda.

The Prosperity 101 program was presented, according to Moore, in at least a dozen workplaces in the heat of the 2010 election campaign -- most of them in Wisconsin. Organizers of Prosperity 101, a for-profit company, were unwilling to speak with AlterNet about it, as were executives at most of the participating companies. So, too, were executives of the Wall Street Journal.

Moore's involvement with such a blatantly political organization -- one whose agenda aligns so obviously with that of the GOP -- is an anomaly for an editorial board member of a national newspaper. AFP pledged to spend $45 million in the 2010 election cycle and launched a barrage of televised attack ads against Democratic candidates.

Founded by Koch in 2003, the AFP Foundation and its sibling organization, simply called Americans for Prosperity (the two share staff but have separate boards of directors), did not gain widespread public notice until the brutal battle against President Barack Obama's health-care reform legislation. The two groups organized battalions of Tea Party activists to oppose the bill at noisy protests and town-hall meetings.

Yet opposition to health-care reform is but one part of the AFP agenda. The groups have also made it a priority to battle energy reformand, according to Tim Phillips, who leads both organizations, to shrink both the government workforce and the unions that represent its rank and file.Last January, in a speech to activists at the Leadership Institute, a right-wing training center located in Arlington, Virginia, Phillips explained that the reason fiscal conservatives failed to win the day on their issues during the tenure of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was that right-wingers did not "have an army on the ground" while "the left did."

"They had the public employee unions," Phillips said, "which have only gotten stronger, have only gotten better-funded, have only gotten better organized in the period of time between the 1990s and today."

Less than six weeks later, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whose career has been propelled by Americans for Prosperity (AFP), introduced the anti-labor budget bill that incited 18 days of mass protests in the state capitol.

A Koch-Murdoch Alliance

http://www.alternet.org/story/151182/wall_street_journal_honcho_shills_for_secret_worker_'education'_program_linked_to_koch_group

There are few people in politics who are quite as hilarious as Stephen Moore.Formerly the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist (he’s now a “Distinguished Visiting Fellow” for the group) Moore has achieved greater notoriety as one of the **worst pundits alive**. The man is constantly, flagrantly wrong. He’s been blacklisted by a major newspaper for making too many embarrassing errors in his columns. He’s a climate change denier who draws his arguments against environmentalism from sci-fi monkey movies. He’s written anti-Obamacare Op-Eds that are literally 0 percent accurate. As an economic thinker he’s been no more successful – he has a string of bad predictions under his belt and a tenuous grasp of the field he’s supposedly an expert in.

But Moore is fortunate to work in conservative politics, where one can make a lucrative career out of being constantly wrong so long as you remain ideologically consistent. Moore is one of thehigh priests of supply-side economic theory and, as such, he’s in hot demand among top-flight Republican political candidates who want him to fix his seal of approval on their plans to “grow the economy” through massive tax cuts.He’s already helped Rand Paul craft a flat-tax proposal that promises to shoot “steroids” into the economy by slashing taxes on the wealthy.

And that brings us to Scott Walker. The Republican governor of Wisconsin is (not yet officially) running for president and he’s been cultivating a relationship with Moore and his supply-side buddies for months in an effort to establish himself as the “pro-business” Republican candidate. That’s trickier than it sounds, given that business-minded establishment Republicans like Moore are generally in favor of immigration reform, while the conservative base voters that Walker must appeal to are vehemently against it.

Walker’s been deliberately fudging his stance on immigration to avoid pissing off either group, but in public he’s been moving further and further to the right to align more closely with the anti-immigrant base. That rightward shift on immigration unnerved Moore, who told the New York Times last week that he asked Walker about it over the phone, and that Walker told him, “I’m not going nativist; I’m pro-immigration.

t seemed clear from Moore’s retelling that Walker was telling two different constituencies two different things – something politicians do all the time. And it makes perfect sense that Walker would publicly shift right on immigration for the GOP primary while privately reassuring more moderate Republicans that he’ll tack back toward the middle once he secures the nomination. It’s cynical as all hell, but it makes sense. But Moore, in blabbing to the Times, ratted out Walker on his double-dealing.

And then things got weird. As the Times noted a few days later, Moore (under heavy pressure from the Walker campaign) not only recanted his quotation of Walker’s secret moderation on immigration – he denied that he’d even spoken to the governor at all: “On Sunday, after three days of pressure from Mr. Walker’s aides, Mr. Moore said that he had ‘misspoken’ when recounting his call with Mr. Walker – and that the call had never actually taken place.”

Breitbart News also asked Moore about his quote to the Times, and he served up this explanation, which makes precisely zero sense:

i did not have a conversation with Walker. It was my mistake. I kind of miscommunicated this to this reporter. What I really meant to say is that Larry [Kudlow] did. And when Larry had the conversation, we felt that he was going to be just fine and not going to be a problem on immigration. Everybody is kind of making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

So according to Moore, when he told the Times that he recently talked to Scott Walker on the phone, what he meant was that Larry Kudlow talked to him months ago over dinner. What’s hilarious about the glaringly obvious bullshit Moore is trying to peddle here is that even if one were to grant Moore the possibility that he misremembered this badly, he’s still outing Walker as a double-dealer on immigration reform: “We felt that he was going to be just fine and not going to be a problem on immigration.” No matter which Stephen Moore story you choose to believe, Scott Walker still comes out looking bad.

And that’s why it’s so remarkable that any political candidate would choose to associate themselves with this doofus. Not only is he constantly wrong, he’s a walking embarrassment and a political liability. But I suppose the rest of us should be thankful that Walker is inviting the Stephen Moore bull to bust up his campaign china shop.

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/08/scott_walkers_double_dealing_exposed_how_one_of_the_rights_worst_talking_heads_just_embarrassed_him/

Takeda and Crown [38] (which is pushing legislation to escape responsibility for people injured or dying from asbestos),

38] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/07/12172/justice-denied-71-alec-bills-2013-make-it-harder-hold-corporations-accountable-ca

...

Average Americans Pay the Price

An increasingly major player in advancing the ALEC tort reform agenda is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its Institute for Legal Reform, both of which are members of the ALEC Civil Justice Task Force.

A big priority for the Chamber this year has been legislation narrowing access to the courts for asbestos victims. The ALEC "Asbestos Claims Transparency Act" was first adopted by members of the ALEC Civil Justice Task Force in 2007 and was introduced in four states in 2013, in many cases supported by testimony from Shook Hardy & Bacon attorney Mark Behrens on behalf of the Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform. The effort would benefit corporations like Crown Holdings, a Fortune 500 company with over $8 billion in annual sales that has worked with ALEC for years to legislate its way out of compensating asbestos victims, as well as ALEC member Honeywell International, which has faced significant asbestos liability in recent years.

Asbestos-related diseases kill at least 10,000 Americans every year, in many cases from mesothelioma, an incurable and painful cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. For decades, asbestos was used for insulation and industrial purposes, and the diseases particularly affect veterans, firefighters, construction workers, and individuals who worked in factories with high-heat machinery.

Asbestos company executives knew from at least the 1940s that asbestos was deadly but covered it up for half of a century. For example, an internal memo from a subsidiary of ALEC member Honeywell in 1966 stated, "if you have enjoyed a good life while working with asbestos products why not die from it?" The disease can take between 20 and 50 years to manifest, so individuals exposed decades earlier are only discovering the illness now.

Like the ALEC-supported voter ID laws that spread across the country in recent years, supporters of the Asbestos Claims Transparency Act claim the law is necessary to stop fraud -- despite no persuasive evidence of significant fraud or abuse. The law is couched in terms of "transparency," but is actually designed to save corporations money by delaying justice for asbestos victims and enacting unnecessary procedural hurdles for getting their day in court.

The bill could allow corporations like Crown Holdings or Honeywell to delay a lawsuit until a victim files claims with any other asbestos or personal injury "trust funds," which are accounts set up after a company goes bankrupt to pay claims to injured parties. This requirement, advocates say, is intended to drag out a case until after a sick victim dies -- an especially pointed concern given that asbestos cancer victims usually die within a year after being diagnosed.

In December of 2012, Ohio became the first state to pass the ALEC asbestos bill, which the Chamber publicly applauded: "'As Ohio goes, so goes the nation,' and we hope this will result in a domino effect," said Lisa Rickard, president of the U.S. Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform. The Wall Street Journal editorial board -- which includes Stephen Moore, an ALEC "advisor" -- published an editorial in support of the legislation.

Consumer and worker advocates expect more states to introduce versions of the Asbestos Claims Transparency Act in 2014. A parallel bill has been introduced on the federal level and recently passed the House Judiciary Committee (prompting a response from the New York Times Editorial Board). Testimony presented to Congress from attorneys at Caplin & Drysdale has identified the ALEC connection.

===

LISA GRAVES: Well, this is really, I think, one of the most extraordinary parts of the documents thatThe Guardian published, because what you have is one of the editorial board members of The Wall Street Journal who is sitting on a board, in essence, of—you know, basically making decisions as a board member of—a grant adviser, pardon me, of the Searle Freedom Trust, telling them which of these State Policy Network groups they should fund for this agenda. And Stephen Moore, time and time and time again, has written—has written op-eds and probably contributed to unsigned editorials by The Wall Street Journal promoting these very policies that he—you know, he has perhaps had a hand in influencing. Now, we don’t know how long Moore has been involved with the Searle Freedom Trust. We know that he’s previously been working with one of the Donors—the Donors Trust or Donors Capital groups on some advising. What we do know is that he has extensive ties to ALEC, most of which have not been disclosed by The Wall Street Journal when they editorialize in favor ofALEC or in favor of these SPN group policies. And we think that’s a really serious issue for theJournal to have such close ties, not just from Stephen Moore, but also from others like John Fund and Paul Gigot in the past, to ALEC, and not disclose to their readers how closely Stephen Moore has been aligned with ALEC and is aligned with some of these groups. In fact, it looks like some of these groups turn around and ask Stephen Moore to write reports that advance their agenda

.===

==

guardian:

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.

The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.

Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.

Most of the "thinktanks" involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of "media campaigns" aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings", in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.

The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.

The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.

SPN's link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a "top 20" and "bottom 20". It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.

Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle's sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman's "commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights".

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• "reforms" to public employee pensionsraised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;

• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;

• an education vouchersystem to promote private and home schooling in Florida;

• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;

• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

SPN's president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that "as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society."

In its grant bid

Wall Street Journal Defends ALEC without Disclosing Deep Ties of Editorial Board Member Stephen Moore

by Lisa Graves [1] — August 19, 2013 - 7:29am

Topics: Corporations [2]

Projects: ALEC Exposed [3]

ALEC Exposed (A project of CMD)The Wall Street Journal's latest defense of the American Legislative Exchange Council [5] (ALEC), penned by WSJ Editorial Board Member Stephen Moore, fails to disclose Moore's deep ties to ALEC.

Moore's op-ed attacks U.S. Senator Richard Durbin for scrutinizing ALEC's role in peddling the Florida "Stand Your Ground [6]" legislation as a model for the nation for more than six years. That law was initially cited to prevent the arrest of George Zimmerman for shooting Florida teenager Trayvon Martin to death, and that law proved to be instrumental in the failure to convict after the jury [7] was instructed that law Zimmerman had a "right to stand his ground" and had "no duty to retreat."

WSJ Conflicts of Interest: Moore's Many Undisclosed Ties to ALEC

However, Moore failed to disclose anywhere in that op-ed that he has a long-standing working relationship with ALEC. These close ties include the facts that:Wall Street Journal Ed Board Member Stephen Moore since at least 2007, Moore has been on ALEC's "Board of Scholars," one of five people with that designation; since 2007, Moore has been the co-author of one of ALEC's main publications, "Rich States, Poor States," which claims to rank the performance of states in accordance with their adherence to ALEC's ideal economic policies, reports that have been strongly criticized [8];

since joining WSJ's editorial board in 2005, Moore has presented on issues such as reducing corporate tax rates at ALEC's closed door task force meetings, where corporate lobbyists vote as equals with state legislators on "model bills" to be introduced into law in state capitols; and in 2009, ALEC said Moore "represents what we should expect of all journalists," and gave him its "Warren Brookes Award" for "journalistic excellence."

WSJ's Moore Cites ALEC Co-Author and Others without Disclosure

Nowhere in his editorial page piece defending ALEC did Moore mention any of these ties. Even when he favorably quoted Jonathan Williams criticizing Senator Durbin's letter -- which asked corporations that had funded ALEC if they support "Stand Your Ground" laws -- Moore noted that Williams is the staff director of one of ALEC's task forces but failed to mention to readers that he himself has a long-standing working relationship with Williams. ALEC's Tax Task Force director is actually Moore's co-author on five of the six editions of the "Rich States, Poor States" report (including the one issued three months ago).

Similarly, in the WSJ op-ed when he quoted newly-elected Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Moore failed to note that Cruz is one of the featured "plugs" for the 6th edition of this piece of work Moore co-authors that is published by ALEC. Likewise, in the op-ed when Moore quoted an unnamed board member of ALEC, he failed to mention his own long-time post on ALEC's Board of Scholars.

However, ALEC has leaned heavily on WSJ editorials as favoring its positions.

To cite one of many examples, last year ALEC's executive director sent an email to ALEC legislators and corporations calling CMD "an attack-dog" and flagging positive editorials about ALEC from the WSJ, none of which disclosed the strong connections between ALEC and Moore to the readers of the WSJ's editorial pages or mentioned the fact that the WSJ's parent corporation, Newscorp [9], is also a member and funder of ALEC, a fact CMD broke [10] last year.

Moore Did Not Disclose Gift from ALEC either

Moore also failed to mention his receiving an award from ALEC. According to ALEC's federal tax form from2009 when it gave Moore the Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism, the award was described as a "cash grant" in the amount of $1,850, and the awards ceremony for Moore included the presentation of a small trophy with a metal scroll and quill.

It is unclear whether ALEC or the Wall Street Journal or some other benefactor has provided Moore with any other gifts, money or benefits for his assistance to ALEC in the rating of all 50 states according to its legislative agenda or for work on other topics he has addressed with ALEC members, such as welfare reform or changing tax laws. There is no independent documentation about whether Moore pays for his trips to ALEC resort meetings out of his own pocket without reimbursement or whether someone else funds those trips.

Additionally, it is not known whether Moore receives any compensation or honorarium from ALEC for either his analysis in the "Rich States, Poor States" publication or for the time he spends promoting that publication on FOX or other TV shows.

It is also not known if Moore has received any compensation from his other co-author of that publication, Art Laffer, or from any of the various Laffer enterprises that support an array of ALEC legislative agenda items.

It is also not known if Moore receives any compensation for being on ALEC's Board of Scholars or whether he is allowed to receive outside compensation as a consultant and under what circumstances he is required by the WSJ to disclose any such contracts to the public.

The WSJ also does not disclose its rate of pay for editorial board members and whether service to a non-profit organization such as ALEC is considered a positive factor in compensation or not.newly combined "financial services" industry with its "Too Big to Fail" Wall Street banks and speculators.

Like Moore, ALEC also gave Fund the Warren T. Brookes award, but that was in 1993 before he joined the WSJ. The award came shortly after he cut his teeth as a journalist working for Bob Novak, the notorious right-wing commentator who called himself the "Prince of Darkness."

As with Moore, none of the known editorials or op-eds penned by Fund about ALEC-related issues disclosed his long connection with ALEC.

Updated: Pro-ALEC WSJ Editorial Runs Same Day Moore Addresses ALEC

CMD's General Counsel, Brendan Fischer, noted that the WSJ ran its editorial "Durbin Wants a List," the same day its editorial board member Moore headlined ALEC's lunch at its 40th anniversary meeting in Chicago. Again, there was no mention of the close ties between the WSJ and ALEC.

The next day, ALEC's spokesman emailed all of the ALEC corporations and legislators using the WSJ's editorial to buttress its position in opposition to Senator Durbin's letter, as CMD's Research Director, Nick Surgey, discovered.

As with the WSJ, ALEC did not tout its inside track with the WSJ editorial board either.

The following week (last week), Moore wrote his latest opinion piece for the WSJ backing ALEC, under his own byline, but again failed to disclose his deep ties to ALEC.

===

Stephen Moore (economist)

Stephen Moore -- Wall Street Journal editorial board member and senior economics writer and former President of the Club for Growth.

Moore has ties to the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, two of the top Koch beneficiaries, and was a National Review magazine contributing editor.

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section serves as a podium for prominent skeptics with ties to the Kochtopus, such as Bjorn Lomborg, Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels. Michaels, the champion denier of the Cato Institute and other Koch-backed institutions, used the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section to continue pushing “climategate” even after scientists were exonerated by formal investigations. Michaels himself is coming under scrutiny for being dishonest during a 2009 Congressional testimony about the funding he receives from the oil industry.

Between moving to the Wall Street Journal and being forced out of the Club for Growth, Moore founded the Free Enterprise Fund with Arthur Laffer and Mallory Factor, both former Club for Growth directors. Arthur Laffer’s Laffer Center for Global Economic Growth is tied to Koch Industries through its Vice Chairman, Richard Fink, and Executive Director Wayne Gable, both prominent Koch executives, and a $100,000 grant from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation in 2009.

Moore is also a frequent commentator on CNBC’s Kudlow & Co and Fox News' On the Record with Greta van Susteren.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/06/19/174361/stephen-moore-denier/

In an otherwise illuminating segment on the Diane Rehm radio show Wednesday about climate change impacts in the United States, one guest played the fool: Stephen Moore — the Wall Street Journal editorial board member, Cato Institute senior fellow, National Review contributing editor, and regular CNBC and Fox News commentator. While his fellow guests — Obama science advisor John Holdren, American Progress president John Podesta, and Bush environmental advisor James Connaughton — discussed the impacts of global warming and how the country can act to prevent catastrophe, Moore argued that the White House’s new climate impacts report is “Stalinistic”:

What I object to about this report is some of the language in this is sort of almost Stalinistic, that there’s an unequivocal conclusion that it’s inarguable that this is happening, that there’s overwhelming agreement among the scientists. None of that is true.

Listen:

Moore also cited the repeatedly debunked Oregon Petition and Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus, arguing it is “highly irresponsible” not to debate the science of man-made climate change. Even though Dianne Rehm admonished Moore for his anti-science outbursts, he continued to pollute the airwaves with Pollyannish complacency . . .

– We’ve talked about global warming as climate improvement.

– The good news is that the bad news is wrong.

. . . an endless stream of discredited lies about global warming and carbon pollution. . .

– John just said nine of the last ten years are the warmest on record. That just isn’t true. In fact, they’ve gone back, and it turns out NASA made a mistake in the model which didn’t get any publicity. John, actually, the truth is the 1930s was a warmer decade than the last decade.

– If there’s a slight uh, global warming trend — and we’re talking about relatively slight, heh — John, there’s just no question that the slight warming of the temperature actually improves agriculture, it doesn’t hurt agriculture. In fact agricultural output would go up.

– In fact, I’m old enough to remember when the scientific consensus that there was going to be cooling, remember, in the 1970s we’re going to have global cooling and we’re all going to starve to death and we’re not going to have agriculture. So you can’t, heh, have it both ways. You can’t say cooling is going to hurt agriculture and warming is going to hurt agriculture.

– We’ve reduced carbon emissions more than Europe has.

. . . apocalyptic and false warnings about the cost of action . . .

– I call it economic hari-kari for this country.

– The economic consensus is this will affect middle class families in a very negative way.

– The one thing I want people to be very clear on: If we do something like the cap and trade, it’s going to cause a gut-wrenching decline in the number of jobs here and it’s going to cause a decline in people’s living standards. Maybe that’s something we need to do to deal with global warming. It’s going to mean the cost of filling up your car, gasoline costs is going to go up, the cost of heating and air conditioning your home is going to go up, the cost of um, the cost of uh, buying any good or service that’s produced here will go up, because energy is a part of it.

– I was in Wheeling, WV, going down the Ohio River. That’s the epicenter of the Rust Belt in America. Steel factories, chemical plants. A big coal-fired power plant. By the way, John, that’s Democratic country, those are Democratic votes. If we do cap and trade, that’s all wiped out.

. . . and ad hominem attacks:

– The reason I think John and a lot of Democrats don’t want to do [a carbon tax] is there’s a bit of dishonesty here, you hide what the tax really is.

– To use this term “denier” is to put down the debate.

When speaking to like-minded audiences, however, Moore apes Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and calls global warming a “scam.” Last month, Moore proudly waved his denier credentials before an audience of conservatives in New Jersey, telling them to “roaring applause”:

I happen to believe that global warming is the biggest scam of the last two decades.

You can listen to the entire program here.

But while it took the IRS four long days to tell people about their conclusion of “inadvertence” and the same four days for ProPublica to report out the dysfunction , people like Rush Limbaugh, and their followers and fellow travelers on Twitter and in the fringe press, rushed headlong to judgment. Here’s what Limbaugh said about the mid-level federal employees at the IRS in Cincinnati on Tuesday: “The people at these government agencies have been stocked with leftists for decades now, and they’re all activists.” What evidence did he offer for this? None. How could he know that someone in a large bureaucracy, shuffling thousands of pieces of paper, didn’t make a mistake? He couldn’t, and he didn’t.

Well, you might say, that’s Limbaugh. But it wasn’t just Limbaugh. Stephen Moore writes for the Wall Street Journal (where I worked for 15 years, and where Mr. Rove also writes). Yet, he called the documents we were sent “illegally leaked .” He knew nothing more than Limbaugh. “What is the motivation,” Moore asked, “for leaking these documents? The answer is that the left is trying to dry up the money of tea party and conservative groups by intimidating donors.” He noted that another group, in another case, had its donor list released. But in our case, there were no donor lists, and we had redacted the limited financial information on the forms we published. Moreover, these applications are completed with the expectation that they’ll eventually be made public—because they are when they are approved. Never mind all that; presumably no need to mention it.

attended koch aspen shindig: Two Mercatus scholars, as well as FOX News' Glenn Beck and the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore, were on the agenda of speakers at the Aspen conference.

As CMD previously reported [59], News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, is an ALEC "scholar" and both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have gone to bat for ALEC as member corporations began to flee earlier this year. What is less well known is that News Corp. owns Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, acquiring it in 2010 for $360 million. Wireless Generation is also an ALEC member. Apparently, Murdoch was anxious to get a piece of the nation's education system, which he describes [60] as a "500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." News Corp's senior Vice President in charge of its education division is none other than former Chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.

Lubienski, for one is skeptical of "self-proclaimed experts on the topic of education" like Murdoch who "aren't accountable to the public" and who have a profit motive coupled with a political agenda of widespread privatization.

Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent Trigger

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Her tenure as the head of the D.C. school system was so controversial, she is widely credited with losing D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection campaign. She was credited with greatly improving test scores in Washington, D.C. schools, but this accomplishment was cast into doubt by a USA Today [61] investigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials. The report found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous.

After resigning from her position in 2010, Rhee went on to start StudentsFirst [62], a 501(c)4 non-profit organization planning to engage in "direct and grassroots lobbying" on education issues including Parent Trigger. [63] Derrell Bradford, a state director for StudentsFirst, [64] spoke on "Enacting a Comprehensive K-12 Education Reform Agenda" at the 2011 ALEC annual meeting.

Rhee's group receives funding from Murdoch, who "has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists." News Corp's Joel Klein serves [65] on her organization's board. Other supporters include New Jersey hedge funder manager David Tepper [66], and Alan Fournier (reportedly [64] big backers of Romney).

Rhee was also [55] in Anschutz's film "Waiting for 'Superman'."

The film is being promoted by former Washington, D.C., public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee spoke at both the RNC and DNC screenings of "Won't Back Down," and her involvement underscores what is often the bipartisan nature of the modern "school reform" movement.

Stephen Moore, Rush Limbaugh, And The Right-Wing War On Science

Blog››› April 8, 2013 5:07 PM EDT ››› JOHN WHITEHOUSE

Zack Kopplin Educates Senior WSJ Writer About Science

On the April 5^th edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, science education activist Zack Kopplin confronted The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore over myths about science funding, pointing out that Moore, who questioned the need for funding research on "snail mating habits," is "not a scientist":

As it turns out, the reason actual scientists are conducting this type of research is because snails carry parasitic worms that kill children:

Watch where you jump in for a swim or where your bath water comes from, especially if you live in Africa, Asia or South America. Snails that live in tropical fresh water in these locations are intermediaries between disease-causing parasitic worms and humans.

People in developing countries who don't have access to clean water and good sanitation facilities are often exposed to the infected snails. Then they're left open to the parasitic worms.

The worms' infectious larvae emerge from the snails, cruise in shallow water, easily penetrate human skin and mature in internal organs.

The result is schistosomiasis, the second most socioeconomically devastating disease after malaria. As of 2009, 74 developing nations had identified significant rates of schistosomiasis in human populations.

Moore is not some fringe right-winger. He is the senior economics writer and an editorial board member forThe Wall Street Journal. And, while on a nationally televised show, he called for killing a government-funded scientific study while bragging about not understanding the research behind it.

If this sounds familiar, it's because Rush Limbaugh said virtually the same thing on his radio show earlier that day, suggesting that science today is an extension of the Democratic Party:

For conservative media like Moore and Limbaugh, scientific ignorance is a feature, not a glitch. From climate science and polar bears to economics to condoms to social sciences to duck penises, conservative media peddle the same anti-science behavior over and over and over. The logic goes that scientists are inherently biased because they care about science. It's third-rate sophism combined with fourth-rate Luddism.

This is not to say that all scientists are correct just by virtue of them being scientists. Rather, media should respect the scientific method, whereby scientists present arguments with data and rigourously test ideas until a consensus emerges. It's essentially a free market for scientific ideas. Does that sound like something conservatives should be interested in?

For more on the scientific method and research projects, check out Zack Kopplin's petition.

Posted in Economy, Environment & Science

PersonRush Limbaugh, Stephen Moore

Show/PublicationReal Time, The Rush Limbaugh Show

Stories/InterestsEconomy

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/04/08/stephen-moore-rush-limbaugh-and-the-right-wing/193530

**Stephen Moore** -- Wall Street Journal editorial board member and senior economics writer and former President of the Club for Growth.

Moore has ties to the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, two of the top Koch beneficiaries, and was a *National Review* magazine contributing editor.

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section serves as a podium for prominent skeptics with ties to the Kochtopus, such as Bjorn Lomborg, Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels.Michaels, the champion denier of the Cato Institute and other Koch-backed institutions, used the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section to continue pushing “climategate” even after scientists were exonerated by formal investigations. Michaels himself iscoming under scrutiny for being dishonest during a 2009 Congressional testimony about the funding he receives from the oil industry.

Between moving to the Wall Street Journal and being forced out of the Club for Growth, Moore founded the Free Enterprise Fund with Arthur Laffer and Mallory Factor, both former Club for Growth directors. Arthur Laffer’s Laffer Center for Global Economic Growth is tied to Koch Industries through its Vice Chairman, Richard Fink, and Executive Director Wayne Gable, both prominent Koch executives, and a $100,000 grant from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation in 2009.

Moore is also a frequent commentator on CNBC’s Kudlow & Coand Fox News' On the Record withGreta van Susteren.

greenpeace

wiki?

Stephen Moore (born February 16, 1960) is an American economic writer and policy analyst who founded and served as president of the Club for Growth from 1999 to 2004. He is currently a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and frequently opines on the pages of their op-ed section. Moore is known for advocating free-market policies and supply-side economics.

Contents[hide]

[edit] Background and education

Moore was born in Chicago, Illinois. Raised in New Trier Township, Illinois, he is a graduate of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. He has a B.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. from George Mason University in economics.

[edit] Early career

From 1983 through 1987, Moore served as the Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs at the Heritage Foundation. Moore also was a fellow of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Moore was the senior economist of the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee under Chairman Dick Armey of Texas.^[1] There, he was also an architect of the Armey flat tax proposal in 1995. He was also part of the research team hired by Americans For Fair Taxation to create the FairTax, the most co-sponsored tax reform proposal in Congress.^[citation ^needed] He is currently a partner in the econometrics firm Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics.

Moore resigned his position as president of the Club for Growth in December 2004. His opponents within the organization faulted him with disorganized management, while his supporters credited him with raising $20 million to fund candidates for the 2004 elections.

[edit] Free Enterprise Fund

In 2005, he founded the 501 c(4) Free Enterprise Fund with other prominent Club for Growth members including Arthur Laffer and Mallory Factor.^[2] Under Moore's direction, the Free Enterprise Fund lobbied for Social Security privitization, the permanent repeal of estate tax, and for tort reform.^[3] It is also opposed to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act.

[edit] Wall Street Journal

On May 31, Moore left the Free Enterprise Fund to serve on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.^[4]

[edit] Media appearances

Moore is a contributing editor for National Review and a frequent economics commentator on CNBC's Kudlow & Company. He also appears on Fox News' On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren. He is also a frequent commentator on CNN's weekend program Your Money. Moore appeared on the October 10, 2008, episode of Bill Maher's HBO show Real Time With Bill Maher where Congressman Barney Frank accused him of distorting the truth, saying "Frankly, I have more respect for you than the kind of pattern of distortion you engage in here", in response to Moore suggesting that some Democrats in Congress take a favorable view of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, among others.^[5]

[edit] Personal life

Moore is married to his wife Allison and has three children: Justin, William, and David.^[6][7][8]

[edit] Bibliography

It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years with Julian L. Simon (Cato Institute, 2000) ISBN 1-882577-97-3
Bullish On Bush: How George Bush's Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger (Madison Books, 2004) ISBN 1-56833-261-0
The End of Prosperity with Arthur B. Laffer and Peter Tanous (Threshold Editions, 2008) ISBN 1-4165-9238-5
Still an Open Door? U.S. Immigration Policy and the American Economy (American University Press, 1994)
Privatization: A Strategy for Taming the Deficit (The Heritage Foundation, 1988)
He is also the editor of Restoring the Dream: What House Republicans Plan to Do Now to Strengthen the Family, Balance the Budget, and Replace Welfare (Times Mirror, 1995).

[edit] Additional writings

[edit] References

^ Bush's Tax Proposal. The Washington Post. 8 February 2001.
^ Kirkpatrick, David (July 8, 2005). "Leadership Dispute Causes a Split in a Powerhouse of Fund-Raising for Conservative Causes". The New York Times: section a, column 1, national desk, p.20.
^ Pierce, Greg (May 3, 2005). "Inside Politics". The Washington Times: p. A07.
^ Pierce, Greg (May 3, 2005). "Inside Politics". The Washington Times: p. A07.
^ Guest appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher.
^ Leiby, Richard (January 26, 2005). "The Reliable Source". The Washington Post: section C, p.3.
^ [1]
^ http://www.nndb.com/people/742/000062556/

[edit] External links

Stephen Moore at NNDB.
Interview with Robert Ringer.
Moore, Stephen. Why Make a Deal? The Weekly Standard.
Free Enterprise Fund web site

Other offices	Other offices	Other offices
Preceded by Organization Founded	President of the Club for Growth 1999–2004	Succeeded by Pat Toomey

Other offices

Preceded by

Organization Founded

President of the Club for Growth

1999–2004

Succeeded by

Pat Toomey

Persondata	Persondata
Name	Moore, Stephen
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	February 16, 1960
Place of birth	Chicago, Illinois
Date of death
Place of death

nndb

Architect of Dick Armey's flat-tax proposal, which Moore generated as Armey's economics policy adviser. Moore currently heads the Club for Growth, a conservative action committee dedicated to promoting anti-tax political candidates. During the 2004 primary elections, the Club for Growth spent more than a million dollars trying to defeat incumbent Republican Senator Arlen Specter in favor of conservative Congressman :{Pat :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Toomey:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:. Specter narrowly survived the internecine battle.

African American Republican Leadership Council Advisory Panel

American Conservative Union Board of Directors

American Legislative Exchange Council Board of Scholars

Cato Institute Former Director of Fiscal Policy Studies

Cato Institute Senior Fellow

Club for Growth President

DonorsTrust Board of Directors, Donors Capital Fund

Free Enterprise Fund Founder

Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow

The Heritage Foundation Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs (1983-87)

Hoover Institution Visiting Scholar

Media Research Center