Should-Read: Paul Krugman: @paulkrugman on Twitter: Understated NYT Headline

Should-Read: Well, yes, Paul Krugman is shrill this morning. What did you expect? Paul Krugman: @paulkrugman on Twitter: Understated NYT Headline: https://t.co/3hrbq6mp5n “There is no analysis, because Trump admin doesn’t want one—afraid it will say what all the other analyses say, which is not good for admin case. Mnuchin has been lying all along…

…A thread on lies, damned lies, voodoo economics and cowardice: from the beginning, the core claim of the Trump administration has been that its tax cuts would raise growth so much that they would pay for themselves. It claimed to have analysis to that effect. As many of us suspected, that claim was a flat-out, brazen lie. There never was such an analysis, and the tax experts at Treasury were in fact prevented from carrying out any analysis. But let us not simply blame Mnuchin and the Trump admin. Senate Republicans are also trying to ram their bill through before JCT, Congress’s own scorekeeper, has time to assess its impact on growth and any “dynamic” effects—bc they know it won’t be good.

And let’s also not let Republican-leaning economists off the hook, What Brad DeLong calls the Nine Unprofessional Economists released an open letter asserting great growth effects from corporate tax cuts. In so doing, they misrepresented the research https://t.co/8uiLJ27rbE. They didn’t explicitly claim that tax cuts pay for themselves—but they didn’t strongly assert the contrary either; clearly, their goal was to offer aid and comfort to the tax cutters while preserving deniability. And aid and comfort they provided:

And when called on their two-facedness, they denied having said what they very clearly said. (Similar to the behavior of some of the same people after their false claims about Fed policy) So this was both disingenuous and cowardly.

The rot and corruption here spreads wide and runs deep. It encompasses not just Trump and company, but essentially all Republicans in Congress and many Republican-oriented professional economists.