Larry Kudlow, the Newsmax Insider and economist who is being considered for an advisory role in the Trump White House, is facing criticism from liberal media outlets for not having proper academic credentials.

That should be considered the best recommendation for the job, The Wall Street Journal says on its editorial page.

“One of the more amusing campaigns is the progressive assault on the prospect that Larry Kudlow could lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers,” the WSJ says. “Can there be a more compelling endorsement?”

Bloomberg View’s Noah Smith says Kudlow’s lack of a Ph.D. in economics and failure to predict the last recession are among his missing qualifications for a White House job.

“All commentators make bad calls once in a while and plenty of them didn't anticipate the financial crisis of Great Recession,” Smith says. “But Kudlow's miss on the recession demonstrates three things that worry me: overconfidence, partisanship and an excessive focus on the problems of the 1970s.”

The WSJ responds:

“An academic degree is no guarantee of economic wisdom, as Administrations from Nixon’s to President Obama’s have shown. Mr. Kudlow is conversant enough with economic literature to do the job.”

“Another rap is that Mr. Kudlow failed to predict the 2008 financial panic. Well, so did most people, including Timothy Geithner when he was president of the New York Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke while he was Fed chairman.”

“The real reason the Keynesian tong dislikes Mr. Kudlow is that he disagrees with their assumptions. He thinks tax cuts that change incentives produce more growth than do government transfer payments. He thinks the Keynesian “multiplier” model that $1 in spending produces $1.70 in growth is nonsense, as do most people who didn’t get a Ph.D. at MIT or Princeton. This is precisely why Mr. Trump could use Mr. Kudlow on his economic team.”



John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the past 100 years, argued that the government should use deficit spending as a way to spur full employment. His ideas have shaped the fiscal policies of every country in the world.

Keynes's deficit-spending claims have been challenged by academic research that finds the so-called “multiplier effect,” in which the government stimulates the economy by spending a dollar that gets spent again and again by businesses and consumers, is a fantasy cooked up by economists.

“The government spending multiplier is in fact negative, meaning that a dollar of deficit spending slows economic output,” according to a research summary by Hoisington Investment Management Inc. “The government has to withdraw funds, via taxes or borrowing, from the private sector, to spend their dollars. When that happens, the productive private sector of the economy has fewer funds to use to make productive investments.”

Kudlow first worked at the New York Federal Reserve before joining the Reagan White House as a budget official, according to the WSJ. He was chief economist at investment bank Bear Stearns from 1987 until his resignation in 1994. For the past 15 years, he has appeared as a commentator on CNBC. Kudlow also is a Newsmax Insider columnist and hosts a radio program.

The Council of Economic Advisers has little political power, the WSJ says. The group has three economists, typically from the academic world.