Republican economist Art Laffer, an architect of the Reagan era tax cuts that paved the way for historic budget deficits in the United States, has a plan to rejuvenate today’s pandemic-crippled economy.
Tax non-profits. Cut the pay of public officials and professors. Give businesses and workers who manage to hold on to their jobs a payroll tax holiday to the end of the year.
What about the extra aid funneled to newly jobless workers by the $2.3 trillion fiscal rescue package? Such government spending, Laffer told Reuters in an interview, will only serve to deepen the downturn and slow the recovery.
“If you tax people who work and you pay people who don’t work, you will get less people working,” Laffer said. “If you make it more unattractive to be unemployed, then there’s an incentive to go look for another job faster.”
Laffer’s unconventional plan isn’t just an academic exercise. First of all, he says he has presented it to his contacts at the White House. They include presidential economic advisor Larry Kudlow, who considers Laffer a mentor.
Laffer is also being floated in influential right-wing circles as a good candidate to head a proposed new industry task force aimed at re-opening the U.S. economy as soon as possible. “Bring in the minds like Art Laffer,” Sean Hannity, the Fox News host said April 6 of the proposed task force.
It makes perfect sense that Trump would rely on the man who came up with the most fatuous theory in history — “Supply Side Economics” which held that if you cut taxes, government revenue would go up. The cynical Republicans loved it, of course. They were only interested in the “cut taxes” part, knowing they could use the massive debt it cause in order to force the government to cut all the programs that help people.
That he’s come up with a daft proposal to “incentivize” people to go back to work when the government is telling them to stay home so hundreds of thousands of people don’t die is just his and Larry Kudlow, his acolyte’s, speed. Lunacy.
It would be hard to find anyone less suited to be dispensing economic advice at a time like this. But you can be sure that if such people exist, they are scouring the country looking for them.
By the way, Trump gave Laffer the presidential medal of Freedom last year.