The major, AKA nominally adult, figure who was terribly wrong was Prof. Martin Feldstein of Harvard. Chait cites 2 op-eds Feldstein wrote for the WSJ that criticized Clinton's plan to raise taxes in 1993. Lexis-Nexis has the titles, dates and brief summary of these 2 supply-side screeds:
CLINTON'S PATH TO WIDER DEFICITS, WALL STREET JOURNAL, February
23, 1993, Tuesday:
...argues that President Clinton's budget plan will produce larger budget
deficits, since it is based on the fallacy that taxpayers will not change their
behavior in response to a 37% jump in their marginal tax rates (L)
CLINTON'S REVENUE MIRAGE, WALL STREET JOURNAL, April 6, 1993,
Tuesday: President Clinton's tax package is a failure by any reasonable measure
of economic damage per dollar of additional tax revenue (L)
We now know that Clinton's tax increase resulted in a 47.1% increase in federal tax revenue, dwarfing the 20.6% under Raygun. Feldstein was joined by the usual crackpots, such as Larry Kudlow, Forbes Magazine and the editors of the WSJ. On March 8, 1993, Kudlow wrote in the WSJ that:
"There is no question that President Clinton's across-the-board tax increases...will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy's long-run potential to grow."
Kudlow is aired by CNBC, has a radio show on WABC, is a columnist for the National Review and according to his bio on CNBC:
Kudlow is consistently ranked one of the nation’s premier and most accurate economic forecasters according to The Wall Street Journal’s semiannual
forecasting survey.
It would be normal to ask why these people aren't considered laughingstocks but a VERY important tenet of Wingnut World is that not only don't the facts matter, the empirical approach is itself suspect and that comes from MAJOR wingnut thinkers, like Leo Strauss and Richard Weaver.
Turning back to the war, you'd think that the neo-cons who helped get us into this mess would be on the sidelines but you would be wrong. Giuliani, the leading GOP presidential candidate, has been hiring these freakshows:
Used Hawks Flock to Giuliani's Team
Who Has His Ear? Giuliani's foreign-policy team is heavy on neocons
By Michael Hirsh NEWSWEEK
Oct 15, 2007 Issue
One of the top foreign-policy consultants to the leading GOP candidate is Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neocon movement.
Podhoretz is in favor of bombing Iran because of the country's unwillingness to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. He also believes America is engaged in a "world war" with "Islamofascism" and that Giuliani is the only man who can win it. "I decided to join Giuliani's team because his view of the war—what I call World War IV—is very close to my own," Podhoretz tells NEWSWEEK. (World War III, in his view, was the cold war.) "And also because he has the qualities of a wartime leader, including a fighting spirit and a determination to win."
Among the core consultants surrounding Giuliani: Martin Kramer, who has led an attack on U.S. Middle Eastern scholars since 9/11 for being soft on terrorism; Stephen Rosen, a hawkish professor at Harvard who advocates major new spending on defense and is close to prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol; former Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten, who often sided with the neocons during the Reagan era and was an untiring supporter of aid to Israel, and Daniel Pipes, who has advocated for the racial profiling of Muslim Americans.
Looks like Walt and Mearsheimer were correct about the influence Israel has on our foreign policy:
Regardless of any differences on Iran, Giuliani's neocons are in line with his pro-Israel stance. ... On a trip to Israel in 2001, Giuliani told an Israeli audience: "We're together with you. We are bound by blood." Earlier this year, in an interview with Foreign Affairs magazine, Giuliani suggested that "too much emphasis" had been placed on promoting negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
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