For those who weren’t reading my blog before it was folded into the column page, “wonkish” posts were written with economists or highly economics-fluent readers in mind, not the broader public. I put up the “wonkish” as a warning to normal human beings. So here’s one of those on the topic of the day; if funny diagrams and economese aren’t your thing, feel free to skip.

Tax experts are going to be up all night trying to figure out what’s really in the bill Republicans dump today, just a couple of days before the vote. I have no skill in reading legislation, so I’ll wait for them to do the job. In the meantime, I had a new thought on claims that corporate tax cuts will produce lots of economic growth – a different way to make the “leprechaun economics” point I’ve been making repeatedly, to little avail.

The leprechaun economics message is that even if corporate cuts bring in lots of capital, raising GDP, the gains in GNP – income of domestic residents – will be substantially smaller, because foreign investors will demand a return on their money. It’s leprechaun economics because we see that effect in Ireland, which has attracted lot of capital in part because it has low corporate taxes, but whose GNP is only 75 percent of its GDP, because so much of the value of what it produces accrues to foreign corporations.

So how does the model that makes vastly more optimistic predictions than almost everyone else – the Tax Foundation model – take account of this issue? It doesn’t. They don’t even look at GNP.