Must-Read: Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz and John. B. Taylor: Economists respond to Summers, Furman over Mnuchin letter

Must-Read: The Nine Unprofessional Republican Economists have become even more unprofessional. I would also note that such transparent self-contradiction is incompetent. Do they even read what they wrote four days before?: Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz and John. B. Taylor (Wednesday, November 29, 2017): Economists respond to Summers, Furman over Mnuchin letter: “First Point You Raised: Our letter addresses the impact of corporate tax reform on GDP; we did not offer claims about the speed of adjustment to a long-run result (though official revenue estimators will obviously need to do so for short-run analysis)…”

Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz and John. B. Taylor (Saturday, November 25, 2017): How Tax Reform Will Lift the Economy: “A conventional approach to economic modeling suggests that such an increase in the capital stock would **raise the level of GDP in the long run by just over 4%. If achieved over a decade, the associated increase in the annual rate of GDP growth would be about 0.4% per year…”

The “If” at the start of the second sentence in the second quote is an assertion that the long run could well be as short as a decade. That is a claim about the lower bound of the speed of adjustment to a long-run result if I have ever seen one.

They have reputations: blowing them up for the whole world—or even for Wales—would be one thing. This is another: