You’ve gotta feel sorry for pundits, in a way. Being forced to come up with compelling opinions on the emerging facts of the day must be stressful with deadlines always looming. Then there are the picky readers who try to make their life miserable when they screw up. On the other hand, the truth, and even our moral conscience demand that we do not let them deceive the public. To that end, we turn our attention to an article by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman from September 14, 2003 entitled ‘The Tax-Cut Con.” In it he claims that supply side economists, led by The Public Interest editor Irving Kristol, set out to deceive the American public by selling tax cuts as painless when they knew government programs would have to be cut as a result of the loss in revenue. He writes:
“This isn’t just speculation. Irving Kristol, in his role as co-editor of The Public Interest, was arguably the single most important proponent of supply-side economics. But years later, he suggested that he himself wasn’t all that persuaded by the doctrine: ‘I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities. ‘Writing in 1995, he explained that his real aim was to shrink the government and that tax cuts were a means to that end: ‘The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.’ In effect, what Kristol said in 1995 was that he and his associates set out to deceive the American public. They sold tax cuts on the pretense that they would be painless, when they themselves believed that it would be necessary to slash public spending in order to make room for those cuts.”
All it takes is a few google searches to find the original context of the Kristol quotes, and one can see how Krugman took them out of context. The first quote is from Kristol’s “An Autobiographical Memoir” the introductory chapter in the book Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. In it, he describes his early days at the American Enterprise Institute when he was still ‘assiduously studying’ the economic literature, and his first reaction to hearing about supply side economics from Jude Wanniski. I think he can be forgiven for not being ‘certain of its economic merits’ right away.
He immediately goes on to describe how he now understands supply-side economics, and why he thinks it failed in the Reagan years, and why “there is nothing wrong with supply side economics but there is often something wrong with the people attracted to it.” As for the ‘political possibilities,’ Kristol makes it clear that he is really talking about refocusing the ‘dismal science’ of Republican economics, which was patronizing to the electorate, on a more optimistic ‘economics of growth.’
The second quote comes from an aticle in the Public Interest entitled “American Conservatism 1945-1995.” Again, Kristol is referring to the early days when his ideas on the subject were ‘cavalier’ and immature. These are not positive judgments of his own past positions. It may be a surprise to Krugman that a political thinker would capitalize on the political effectivness of an idea, since his Democrats clearly would never do such a thing. Kristol’s real aim was not, as Krugman claims, to shrink the government. He did want to replace some programs aimed at fighting poverty with ones he thought would be more effective.
He seemed to be passionate about the idea that government spending should not grow faster than the economy. That is one of the essential goals of supply side economics for him. He is not one of the ‘starve the beasters’ that Krugman speaks of, whose deplorable agenda is to cut taxes for the rich until there is no money left in the government to help the poor. Kristol is actually a surprisingly measured and reasonable thinker who was, not surprisingly, misrepresented in the New York Times.
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