ARTHUR LAFFER, ANOTHER WINGNUT PRINCE OF IRONY

On Jiggles Limbaugh's show, Laffer repeated a favorite meme of the wingers - the colossal impracticality of intellectuals. This is part of the wingers defense of no-nothing populism that Irving Kristol helped create. Laffer embarassed himself at the OMB (1970-72) with faulty projections and in 2006 predicted that there would be no recession and that the housing bubble wouldn't burst in the next year or two. In short, he's no one to make this kind of remark:

LAFFER: Well, I'm not really sure, but if you've ever been to the university with fellow professors, I mean they may be able to manipulate a Feynman diagram or invert a matrix over a Banach space, but they don't know how to pay their lunch bill and they can't tie their shoes. And what you see here are these types of mistakes are classic professorial mistakes, lawyer mistakes. They think that if you change a law, Rush, all of a sudden things are working in that direction. It's not true. And they have no idea of the real world. They've never made a bad trade. They've never suffered the humility of their own ideas being wrong. Because in their classroom their ideas are always right, and that's the trouble with this administration, that they really don't have a clue.