My top book picks of 2019

Couldn’t resist. This year, I kept as much of an eye on new releases as I could; here are my top picks, culled from an admittedly short list. Hyperlinks, when present, take you to my reviews on Goodreads.

On global warming, we have The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, On Fire, by Naomi Klein and the Warmer collection, on Amazon Kindle (six short books—my favorite was Jesse Waters’ The Way the World Ends). ) Because global warming is looming, and we need the facts and the art to deal with it

 Then there was The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead. What a great followup to his last novel. Gripping. Horrifying.

Then there was Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay by James Baldwin—he tells writing instruction like it is. I also loved The Problem With Everything, by the wonderful Meghan Daum—she's a unique feminist voice we need more of.

It was a bit of a grind, but Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto should be required reading for both those who espouse a greater social safety net for today’s vulnerable people and aging, bitter white collar types grousing about young people and their “entitlements.” I didn’t fully agree with Matt Taibbi’s takedown of the mainstream media in Hate Inc, but he’s ideologically and intellectually consistent, and well worth listening to.

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was so good, I read it through twice. Yes. It’s that good.

 But because we live in the world we live in, I also have to put before you Trumponomics, by Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffler. It’s total crap, but if you want to see the direction his financial advisers took us, look no further. (Also, my review is at the top of the Goodreads page, so if you like it, you're fighting the power--hint hint).  

None of these books are on this list. But they're still good.

Runners up: Whose Boat Is This Boat? by Stephen Colbert (because yes, it’s accurate, he really said all that) and Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (which I haven’t read yet, but going off her speeches and media coverage, I think it belongs on any list worth considering).

 Happy 2020. Read on.

"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.