"No Tax" Pledge and Laffer Curve Suckers!!!

Republicans are the juvenile party of bad ideas now controlling the country. Here are just two that should embarrass them. 

Grover Norquist, at 12 years old, gave us the "No Tax" Pledge: A little noticed part of the 60 Minutes interview with Grover Norquist should tell you everything you ever needed to know about the no tax pledge, and the idiots who took it. Admit it, didn't Norquist's plan always seem really stupid, unless you were some math challenged conservative?

Norquist actually hatched his idea when he was 12 years old during his bus riding to school.

Let's be clear; the GOP is marching in lockstep to a 12 year old's dumb-ass idea.



Tax Cuts beloved Laffer Curve Myth: An idea sketched on a napkin...why not, and just as ridiculous, taken seriously by every Republican no matter how many times if fails miserably. NPR:

Ronald Reagan's former budget director, David Stockman, calls Art Laffer "the greatest FakeEconomist to ever come down the pike."

Laffer helped popularize the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves through faster economic growth. It almost never works out in practice.

Tax historian Bruce Bartlett, who later worked in the Reagan White House, said "So if you wanted to have a tax cut, you had to either pay for it by raising other taxes, cutting spending or come up with some gimmick like the Laffer Curve to simply assert that it wouldn't lose revenue." 

Laffer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation's highest civilian honor — from President Trump. "Few people in history have revolutionized economic thought and policy like Dr. Art Laffer," Trump said. "Prominent academics called this theory 'insanity,' 'totally wacky' and 'completely off the wall,' " Trump said. "Art would go on to prove them all wrong."

In fact, it was Laffer's rosy forecasts that were proved wrong, time and time again.

Laffer's journey to this moment began 45 years ago with a round of drinks in a Washington cocktail lounge. At the time, Laffer was a young economist at the University of Chicago trying to convince President Ford's deputy chief of staff — a man named Dick Cheney — that lowering taxes could actually boost government revenue. "He sketched out this Laffer Curve on a paper cocktail napkin at the Hotel Washington, just across the street from the White House."

I also loved this analysis: 

In the real world, Laffer’s contributions have built a streak of unbroken wrongness over a time and scale few policy entrepreneurs in history can match. 

1. Laffer predicted Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts would pay for themselves. When they instead produced historic deficits, Laffer continued to claim he was right. 

2. He predicted Bill Clinton’s attempt to reduce the deficit by raising taxes on the rich would backfire (“I think the plan will fail. It entails price controls, which have never worked. It calls for tax increases, and that’s exactly the wrong way to go. It makes no sense to raise taxes on people who work and pay more to those who don’t work. This is the Reagan revolution in reverse”). Instead, revenue growth exceeded projections.

3. He likewise predicted President Obama’s plan would “destroy the economy” (it did not) and that President Trump’s tax cut would “pay for itself many times over” (it did not pay for itself at all), among many other failed predictions. 

4. Not content to botch his analysis of the federal budget, he has parachuted into several state governments and prodded Republicans into adopting his utterly false worldview. In Kansas and Louisiana, Republican governors listened to Laffer and produced fiscal catastrophe so comprehensive and undeniable Republicans in their state revolted.