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Democracy & Technology Blog Those silly moon-bats…

Quick, Jon Chait, which raving supply-side moon-bat wrote this today?

“In the past 50 years, there have been two macroeconomic policy changes in the United States that have really mattered. One of these was the supply-side reduction in marginal tax rates, initiated after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and continued and extended during the current administration. The other was the advent of “inflation targeting,” which is the term I prefer for a monetary policy focused on inflation-control to the exclusion of other objectives. As a result of these changes, steady GDP growth, low unemployment rates and low inflation rates — once thought to be an impossible combination — have been a reality in the U.S. for more than 20 years.”

Yes, of course, it was that frothing fringe dodo named Robert E. Lucas, Jr., winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize.
(See my review of Jonathan Chait’s book The Big Con here: http://www.disco-tech.org/2007/09/the_big_boom.html.)

Bret Swanson

Bret Swanson is a Senior Fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, where he researches technology and economics and contributes to the Disco-Tech blog. He is currently writing a book on the abundance of the world economy, focusing on the Chinese boom and developing a new concept linking economics and information theory. Swanson writes frequently for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal on topics ranging from broadband communications to monetary policy.