"Trumponomics" ruined the last weekend of my winter break

I should have known better, but I dove into Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer’s Trumponomics the past couple of days.

I couldn’t help it. This week alone, I saw a Washington Post columnist go head to head with Moore over his nonsense about interest rates and the effects of Trump’s trade war on American commodities; I saw Mehdi Hasan hold Laffer’s feet to the fire about the evidence for tax cuts resulting in prosperity for all. Neither of them succeeded in getting either of Trump’s lackeys to acknowledge reality, and I’m starting to think they’re not too concerned with what most of us think anyway. They’re getting what they want. I figured I’d better take a closer look at what exactly it is they want, and why they want it (or why they say they want it, anyway).

Besides, after two weeks of vacation, I was really tired of feeling good and at peace with the world and myself.

Summary: They’re full of it. Foreign Affairs does a much better job picking it apart than I ever could, but for what it’s worth, my two cents can be found below. (It's also on Goodreads, for the record.)

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"Vote for me and you will turn into immortal sex gods with unlimited checking accounts. See this book? It tells you how."

"How many economists does it take to reinvent reality? Apparently two." 

About two thirds through this fine piece of economic cheerleading for Donald Trump’s successful efforts to deregulate and dismantle everything standing between him and his tax cuts and deregulation, punch drunk and bilious, I came across one little nugget that not only got under my skin. I took it personally. 

In a passage championing America plundering its land in order to access energy reserved, touted as hundreds of years’ worth one page and then infinite in another, Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer claim that “In Youngstown, Ohio, steel plants are being rebuilt.” 

My family is from Youngstown, and every time a politician appears there to highlight the decaying rust belt and desperation of the white working class, I can’t help but notice. My grandfather worked in those steel mills. Steel worker unions and union wages helped put me through college. So of course I was overjoyed to learn that Trump was making good on a campaign promise. 

Except, of course, he hasn’t. I don’t think fact checking means anything anymore, but for what it’s worth, PolitiFact reports there’s some evidence of steel mills reopening here and there, but not many, and the number of steel worker jobs is now the same as it was before he was elected, with an overall downward trend in jobs due to technological innovations and other global factors. 

So no. No new steel mills. That’s a lie, and this time they lied about my mother’s home town. 

Well, maybe that’s just an error. Just like their claim that he added 50,000 coal mining jobs (again, the dreaded fact checkers at PolitiFact found this to be misleading). 

Or that the U.S. expansion of shale oil has brought down carbon emissions more than anything (it’s way more complicated than that and is still killing the planet). 

Or their claims about pollution control or voter attitudes or...you know, I think I’m starting to see a pattern here. Trumponomics could not be better named. Like the authors' boss’s name, it evokes spin, salesmanship absent substance. It screams bullshit. 

But hey, maybe that’s all just detail. If we’re going to get to the core of the matter, maybe we’d want to take a closer look at the central premise of the book. Laffer and Moore, who have a long track record of talking up supply side economics, start the book with several chapters’ worth of retelling their story of the campaign, chronicling their work to get the tax reform of 2017 passed and patting themselves and Trump on the back every other page for the “historic growth” we’ve seen since. Their recipe for success: deregulation and tax cuts have historically led to strong economic growth of 3 or 4 percent. Under Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, their thinking goes, the economy grew rapidly, added jobs and decreased the number of people on the dreaded welfare roletherefore all you have to do is cut taxes and deregulate, sit back and watch American become Great Again. Whatever that means. 

Ok, I get wanting to take credit for the economy’s recovery. Trump is hardly the first president to do that. But, again, as fact checkers point out, there’s a range of factors to consider when evaluating an economy, and these guys, who claim to be economists, don’t seem to want to acknowledge that. Besides, Trump’s claims about job creation and growth on his term range from misleading to false, and their credibility is shattered once they start echoing them themselves. 

At any rate, evidence that the country rocks under low taxes depends on how you analyze economic growth over the years, In the past week, as newly sworn in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks about upping marginal rates and getting high earners to pay as much as 70 percent, economists like Paul Krugman are looking at the numbers and seeing nothing to indicate that this would cripple growth. In fact, quite the reverse. 

Look, I can’t claim to have the right answers on economic policy here. As I have made clear time and time again, I am no economist. When it comes to money matters, my philosophy is “I like it.” 

But I know bullshit when I see it. And this book is loaded with it. 

Moore and Laffer can’t conceive of anyone doing anything without examining the taxes involved. They equate Medicaid, Social Security, libraries and unemployment benefits as “welfare,” a dog whistle for Trump supporters if ever I heard one. They keep pointing to the 2016 election and claiming “the voters made it clear” they wanted all of Trump’s policies, apparently being unaware of the margin of victory and who actually won the popular vote. And when the voters don’t agree with their policies, like in 2017 when only 25 percent supported the tax bill, it’s because they’ve been brainwashed by the leftist propaganda machine. 


They repeatedly roar in triumph over what the private sector can do with computers, phones, the Internet and pharmaceutical drugs, apparently completely ignorant as to where these things came from. They reluctantly acknowledge climate change, but only by adding air quotes and talking about hysteria and paranoia; they can’t envision a world reeling from the effects of rising sea levels and higher levels of carbon in the air, and it never occurs to them that that’ll have to be paid for in the long run. All they see is the immediate price tag. 

And when they deplore the financial crisis, all they can talk about is Obama’s response to it; the Wall Street regulation that most people support isn’t even a thought that occurs to them.


To their credit, they stick to their guns over their differences with Trump regarding trade deficits and immigration. But I don’t care. These are the guys who compare him to P.T. Barnum (the man who said there was a sucker born every minute) as if that’s a plus, and they’re the guys who think that the African-American unemployment rate falling is proof that Trump couldn’t possibly be a racist. My God. 

I’m under no illusions about the effect of this book, or any criticism of it, making much of a difference. Trump supporters will read it and go “See?” Trump critics will pick it apart and get absolutely nowhere. At any rate, the authors are impervious to fact checking and criticism. Mehdi Hasan has been heroic in his efforts to pin down Laffer’s evidence for the effectiveness of trickle down economics (both years ago and recently) but when he interviews Laffer, he either gets the economist simply pointing to his own claim and spouting “There you go,” or he gets him simply discounting contrary evidence and bleating “I don’t believe that.” And Moore has made quite a career out of being wrong, starting with his prognostications about the Bush economy, failure to fact check claims about the economy or Obamacare, and going right into last week, when he claimed the U.S. economy was going through deflation and ignored what Trump’s trade war had to do with it all. 

None of this matters. They’re getting their way. They’re drilling and blasting the country for the energy; they’re screwing their and our grandchildren to pursue short term gain; they’re dismantling any and every social service they can while the rich, already doing well, get even richer. But hey, at least we’ll have cheap hamburgers and toasty winters to get us through the tough times.

Democrats: "Careful you don't go too far and do what the people want"

Happy New Year. It’s going to suck. 

We’re already gearing up for the 2020 presidential race. As Elizabeth Warren throws her hat into the ring, and as a bevy of Democrats line up for inspection by the establishment, we’re bound to see posturing and defensive tweeting from our president, not to mention diatribes and scrambling from the Republican Party as they simultaneously try to convince us that they’re “not like that guy” while tipping a wink to their base that “yeah, we so are.”

But as if the right weren’t enough to deal with, the Establishment Left is gearing up to be its own particular brand of headache. The New York Times reports that establishment Democrats are wary of Senator Warren running for office in 2020. They write, “She is regarded with anxiety by much of the Democratic political establishment, including some Senate colleagues who complain that she has pursued an inflexible agenda on matters like bank regulation at the cost of party unity.” 

Good. Let them wet their pants. They deserve it. 

Bad enough the Democrats sold out the working class decades ago, pursued crime laws that wreaked havoc on the poor and minorities, cozied up to private power and screwed our public services up. (See Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal!) Bad enough they blew it in 2016, losing an election to a Cheeto-colored bag of hot wind, ignorance and racism. Now they’ve got a chance to ride a wave of popular discontent, and what are they saying? “Well now...let’s not be hasty...”

No. Let’s. Let’s be hasty as fuck. 

Don’t rock the boat? What boat? The public supports things like national health coverage, free college tuition and, yes, bank regulation. They have for years. Decades.

The Pew Research Center reported in 2017 that 49 percent of Americans said the government “has not gone far enough in regulating financial institutions and markets, leaving the country at risk of another financial crisis.” The Credit Union Times came up with even more striking numbers, finding that 91 percent of survey respondents said it was “important to regulate financial services.” When things like Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were explained to them, the majority of respondents supported them very strongly. 

And the Cato Institute survey results found anywhere from 75 to 80 percent of the people distrust financial institutions and believe they “allow political biases to impact their judgment.” 

But Democrats are worried that a candidate pushing for these kinds of reforms won’t get enough votes? Please. They’re worried about their own ties to power.

The lesson is clear: Democrats claiming to be “the party of the people” who don’t know what “the people” think, or don’t care, are not to be listened to. Ditto columnists and editorial boards grousing about federal overreach (more on them another day).

This disconnect between the voters and those who supposedly work for them, or the media that covers them, has been a topic of no small amount of research in certain circles. Writers like Matt Taibbi have pointed out that one reason Donald Trump won in 2016 was because the media spent so much time talking to themselves, they didn’t bother to talk to actual voters across the convention center from them about what they cared about and what they thought. That helps explain phenomena like why someone who would vote for Barack Obama in 2012 would turn around and vote for someone like Trump four years later. I’m really not interested in going through all that yet again.

So let’s make this one resolution for the New Year. It’s certainly mine, at any rate. Whenever we hear rhetoric from our leaders, pundits and talking heads on television lecturing us about the public's attitude about something, be it big bank regulation, concrete walls to keep out brown people or how flipping' awesome privatized public schools are, let’s be judicious. Let’s be analytical. Let's look into the proposal and find out what we can about how it’s actually viewed. Odds are someone is talking out of their ass.