Vaccine skeptics have a well-deserved reputation for not caring about facts, but according to American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, many right-wing anti-taxers resemble anti-vaxxers in terms of their shaky grasp of reality.
“All the GOP presidential candidates are lining up to receive the wisdom of Arthur Laffer as they formulate their economic plans,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post. “This is the rough equivalent of doctors seeking to lead the American College of Pediatricians competing to see which one can win the favor of Jenny McCarthy…Laffer's theory has been as thoroughly disproven as phrenology or the notion that the stars are pinholes in the blanket Zeus laid across the sky.”
Waldman referred to longtime supply-side enthusiast Laffer as “one of America's foremost economic quacks” and argued that Republicans like tax cuts not because they benefit the overall economy, but “for ideological and moral reasons…[C]utting taxes on the wealthy actually reduces revenue, [but that] doesn't make [Republicans] revise their belief that doing so is right and just, because that belief isn't subject to the test of evidence.”
From Waldman’s post, headlined “The Remarkable Persistence of Crackpot Economics in the GOP” (bolding added):
The most horrifying article you can read today is not about Ayatollah Khamenei's troubling comments on the Iran nuclear deal, it's this piece from Jim Tankersley of The Washington Post about how all the GOP presidential candidates are lining up to receive the wisdom of Arthur Laffer as they formulate their economic plans. This is the rough equivalent of doctors seeking to lead the American College of Pediatricians competing to see which one can win the favor of Jenny McCarthy…
…Laffer's theory has been as thoroughly disproven as phrenology or the notion that the stars are pinholes in the blanket Zeus laid across the sky; Republican economist Greg Mankiw famously referred to those who believe Laffer as "charlatans and cranks." But in a world where Mike Huckabee convinces people that the Bible contains a secret cancer cure and baseball players wear titanium necklaces in the belief that doing so will align their humours or some such nonsense, there will always be a market for crackpottery, particularly the kind that offers a justification for the thing you already want to do.
And this is why Republicans continue to seek Arthur Laffer's wisdom and repeat the completely, thoroughly, 100 percent false claim that cutting taxes for the wealthy will always increase revenue. They want those tax cuts for ideological and moral reasons, and when someone with a claim to expertise tells them that not only is there no cost but that such cuts will actually help the little people too, well that's just too seductive for words. When the world shows them that cutting taxes on the wealthy actually reduces revenue, it doesn't make them revise their belief that doing so is right and just, because that belief isn't subject to the test of evidence.
…We'll spend days hounding a candidate because some consultant he hired sent out some offensive tweets five years ago, or because someone who endorsed him said something outrageous at a rally. But here we have a case in which candidates are voluntarily and knowingly asking for the advice and approval of one of America's foremost economic quacks, specifically for the purposes of formulating policy that would affect every American's life. Is anybody going to ask them what the hell they're doing?
