Lakhota
Diamond Member
Stephen Moore is a joke in the economics profession.
For years, the economic commentariat has enjoyed a running joke: Stephen Moore.
Moore, you see, has made a career of advancing various right-wing political priorities by dressing up as an economist and saying things about money and numbers in print and on TV. Unfortunately, almost nothing he says is true.
Moore is so bad that an editor at the Kansas City Star once refused to run literally anything he ever wrote, because a piece Moore had previously published in the paper was so littered with basic factual errors. He’s a living embodiment of the worst elements of the economics profession ― a man who doesn’t care about the truth, abuses statistics, makes outlandish predictions, smears his opponents and never pays any professional price.
Moore is constantly, laughably wrong. In 1993, he said President Bill Clinton’s slight income tax increase for the wealthiest Americans would “torpedo” the economy. In 2009, he warned that federal budget deficits and the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates were a recipe for hyperinflation, and then doubled down on that prediction. In 2010, he said surging prices would send the price of gold to $2,000 an ounce, as investors fled the worthless dollar for precious metals. None of these things ever happened. He spent much of 2018 applauding President Donald Trump’s supposed efforts to “shoot for” zero tariffs, while Trump actually imposed hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs.
Moore, unscathed, has bounced from the Cato Institute to the Club for Growth to the Heritage Foundation, happily absorbing the excess capital of conservative think-tank donors in the market for a white guy with the courage to advocate tax cuts. On Friday, in what would be the economist’s greatest, most frightening achievement, Trump announced that he will nominate Moore to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
More: Donald Trump Just Picked A Laughingstock For A Huge Federal Reserve Job
This is sadly comical. Trump said he hires only the best people. I've watched Moore struggle to make sense for years. What do you think?