As much as rational economists from both right and left continue to hope that Art Laffer will, at long last, simply shut up, Mr. Laffer shows no signs of doing so. Nor, it would seem, does he have any interest in lessening the actual damage to our country that he has done over the course of two generations. In fact, Mr. Laffer continues to double down on promoting the very policies which have brought us to our knees.
Yesterday afternoon, Neil Cavuto hosted Mr. Laffer over at Fox Business.
Something so very wrong was said that it cannot go unchallenged; It was not any part of the predictable litany of anti-Obamaisms. Nor was it Mr. Laffer's pandering declaration that the stimulus is "the reason we have... high unemployment." What was truly shocking was Cavuto's description of Mr. Laffer as "about as fair and balanced an economist as you're going to get."
This is rather like describing Idi Amin as having been a well rounded humanitarian.
Leave it to a stooge from the Murdoch Device, in this case FOXBusiness "commentator" Eric Bolling, to spin the latest job numbers as "bad news." But the number of provable lies he spouts is troubling... even for a Murdoch Drone.
The most blatant canard he foists relates to what we call "shadow unemployment." He implies that the numbers are primarily down because of people who "have pulled themselves out of the workforce." This is, as any adult who has read the latest numbers will tell you, bullshit. For the very first time a very long time, those numbers actually went down.
It gets better as he smugly dismisses the jobs that were created in the last month:
"A robust economy creates more than 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the population."
Okay. Fine. It would be one thing to merely harp on the fact that less jobs we're created than anyone would like. However, Bolling has argued, as all Murdoch Drones do, that a wholesale return to W Era economic policy, and the "W Tax Cuts" in particular, is the only course that can "correct" our economy. The average monthly job creation under the entire George W Bush administration was... wait for it...
31,250 jobs per month.
Bolling can suck it. Where was his criticism much less his righteous indignation then?
It's worth putting his "analysis" in some broader context. Let's take the way-back-machine to just prior to the 2008 Presidential election. After the several month gas price crisis that Summer, Bolling attributed the easing of wholesale barrel prices to... the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate.
