Bob Bryan — One chart shows why Trump could have big trouble getting his tax plan past some Republicans

Business Insider
One chart shows why Trump could have big trouble getting his tax plan past some Republicans

Bob Bryan

Noah Smith — Supply-Siders Still Push What Doesn't Work

The old recipe of tax cuts, deregulation and fiscal austerity does little for growth.

Bloomberg View
Supply-Siders Still Push What Doesn't Work
Noah Smith

Chye-Ching Huang — Trump Plan: $2.5 Trillion in Program Cuts for Low- and Moderate-Income People; $2.5 Trillion on Two Tax Cuts for Corporations and Wealthy Heirs

President Trump said he was not elected to serve special interests, but instead, “the forgotten men and women of our country, and that’s what I’m doing.” His budget paints a starkly different picture, however, because it would shift trillions of dollars from struggling families to the wealthy.

The Trump budget would cut $2.5 trillion over the next decade from programs that help struggling low-and moderate-income families afford the basics and improve their upward mobility. These are the largest cuts in a President’s budget in the modern era, even when adjusted for inflation or measured as a percent of the economy.…

At the same time, the President proposes roughly $6 trillion in tax cuts (from his tax plan and from the House-passed bill, which he has endorsed, to repeal the Affordable Care Act) over the next decade.

They’re so skewed to the top that the tiny fraction of households with annual incomes above $1 million would get more than $2 trillion in tax cuts. In other words, millionaires would gain trillions from the Trump plan….

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Trump Plan: $2.5 Trillion in Program Cuts for Low- and Moderate-Income People; $2.5 Trillion on Two Tax Cuts for Corporations and Wealthy Heirs
Chye-Ching Huang | Deputy Director, Federal Tax Policy

Robert Waldmann — $ 2.1 trillion here $ 2.1 trillion there and soon you’re talking real money

They are into deep Voodoo. 

Also known as "ledgerdemain."

$ 2.1 trillion here $ 2.1 trillion there and soon you’re talking real money
Robert Waldmann

James Kwak — Kudlow and Economics in the Trump Administration

Title should be Larry Kudow and economism.

I prefer G. W. H. Bush's "voodoo economics."

It seems some people never learn.

Baseline Scenario
Kudlow and Economics in the Trump Administration

James Kwak | Associate Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law

ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

See also

New Yorker
Ayn Rand And Corporate Tax Cuts Won’t Mend The Economy

John Cassidy

Noahpinion
The Fundamental Fallacy of Pop Economics

Noah Smith

Catherine Rampell — Millennials are increasingly rejecting voodoo economics

Younger people no longer drinking the Kool-Aid?

The Washington Post
Millennials are increasingly rejecting voodoo economics

Catherine Rampell
ht Mark Thomas at Economist’s View

David Edwards — Joe Scarborough gives up the game: After 30 years, the GOP base realized ‘it never trickles down’

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough complained on Tuesday that the Republican Party was fracturing because it had advocated economic policies benefiting the richest Americans for the last 30 years with the promise that the wealth would “trickle down” to others — but it never did.

“The problem with the Republican Party over the past 30 years is they haven’t — and I’ll say, we haven’t — developed a message that appeals to the working class Americans economically in a way that Donald Trump’s does,” the former Republican lawmaker explained. “We talk about cutting capital gains taxes that the 10,000 people that in the crowd cheering for Donald Trump, they are never going to get a capital gains cut because it doesn’t apply.”

“We talk about getting rid of the death tax,” he continued. “The death tax is not going to impact the 10,000 people in the crowd for Donald Trump. We talk about how great free trade deals are. Those free trade deals never trickle down to those 10,000 people in Donald Trump’s rallies.”

“You sound like Bernie Sanders,” NBC’s Chuck Todd pointed out.

“But herein lies the problem with the Republican Party,” Scarborough complained. “It never trickles down! Those people in Trump’s crowds, those are all the ones that lost the jobs when they get moved to Mexico and elsewhere. The Republican donor class are the ones that got rich off of it because their capital moved overseas and they made higher profits.”

Joe admits the real reason that the Donald is doing so well. Trickle down is really funnel up.

Raw Story
Joe Scarborough gives up the game: After 30 years, the GOP base realized ‘it never trickles down’

David Edwards

Mark Thoma — Paul Krugman: Cranks on Top

Paul Krugman gets one right, although he doesn't completely know why, being out of paradigm. The the crazies are so far out of paradigm it's still possible to be vaguely right.

Economist’s View
Paul Krugman: Cranks on Top
Mark Thoma | Professor of Economics, University of Oregon

Robert Reich — Paul Ryan’s 7 Terrible Ideas

Yesterday, the new Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, summed up his House Republican agenda – vowing to pursue legislation that would frame a stark choice for voters in 2016.





“Our No. 1 goal for the next year is to put together a complete alternative to the left’s agenda,” he said.

Despite the speech’s sweeping oratory and careful stagecraft, Ryan clings to seven dumb ideas that are also cropping up among Republican presidential candidates.
Here they are, and here’s why they’re dumb:

Voodoo economics. Cut taxes, slash social spending, privatize, and penalize the poor and elderly, in short, funnel munnie to the "job creators."

Robert Reich

Paul Ryan’s 7 Terrible Ideas

Mark Thoma — Paul Krugman: Voodoo Never Dies

Krugman goes all "Marxist,"sort of, and mentions class warfare — of the rich against the rest — because they can.

The opposition needs to roll out Kansas.

"Voodoo never dies" = "Zombie economics" (ht John Quiggin). The zombies run on money.

Economist’s View
Paul Krugman: Voodoo Never Dies
Mark Thoma | Professor of Economics, University of Oregon

Joe Conason — Voodoo Economics Still Isn’t a Plan

Voodoo economics, as the senior (and smarter) Bush so memorably termed this belief system, does not work. But Ryan evidently believes in it, because his budget depends heavily on that old voodoo to achieve balance.

truthdig
Voodoo Economics Still Isn’t a Plan
Joe Conason

Out of paradigm, but true in that the presumed transmission mechanism from saving to investment is false. It will instead increase economic rent and drive up asset prices, increasing costs for most people. David Stockman admitted that the rationale intentionally manufactured as a ruse to justify ideological policy and fool the rubes.

Dueling wings of the GOP

Newsmax, a nutritional supplement sales organization and expensive email list with a right-wing news website attached, is hosting a Republican presidential debate, “moderated” by fictional television clown tycoon Donald Trump, set to air on a television channel you probably don’t actually know you have that spends most of the broadcast day airing paid programming. Historical fiction author Newt Gingrich — a disgraced serial adulterer with a still-unexplained $500,000 credit line at Tiffany and Co. who is also for some reason the current frontrunner for the party’s nomination — could not be happier. For some crazy reason, Republican campaign strategist Karl Rove is not particularly thrilled with all of this.

Read the rest at Salon
Rove v. Trump: The Unlikely War for the Soul of the GOP
by Alex Pareene

From the economic point view, this is a duel between two wings of the GOP, the tradition fiscal conservative wing that regards debt as immoral and seeks to balance budgets and the Bush/Cheney/Laffer "deficits don't matter" wing that Poppy Bush called "voodoo economics" when running against Reagan for the nomination. Fiscal conservatives believe that it was Bush's extravagance that lead to the election of Barack Obama, whom they regard as a Kenyan Marxist/Keynesian socialist.