Consistently wrong on the economy

NYMag.com President Trump’s new chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, has been “historically, massively wrong” about the economy for decades, said Jonathan Chait. Kudlow, the former CNBC host taking over from Gary Cohn as head of the National Economic Council, is a doctrinaire supplysider who has an almost “theological” belief in cutting taxes. When President Bill Clinton raised the top income tax rate in 1993, Kudlow predicted it would halt the recovery and depress growth. An unprecedented boom followed. Kudlow prophesied the Bush tax cuts would generate such growth that budget surpluses would blossom; instead, they produced giant deficits. In 2007, he dismissed housing bubble fears as a “hallucination” created by Bush-hating pessimists. “There’s no recession coming,” he insisted. After stocks crashed and the Great Recession set in, he warned that President Obama’s stimulus program would strangle the recovery. This year Kudlow predicted that the Republican corporate tax cut would pay for itself; it is already ballooning the annual deficit to $1 trillion. Predictably, Kudlow is pushing for yet another tax cut. With Trump and Kudlow at the helm, “the dawn of fiscal sanity in the GOP is receding ever further into the distant future.”