Photo

Yesterday a former government official at a meeting I was attending asked a very good question: have any prominent Republican economists taken a strong stand against the terrible, no good, very bad tax legislation their party just rammed through the Senate? I couldn’t think of any. And this says something not good about the state of at least that side of my profession.

We can divide Republican economists into three groups here. First are those enthusiastically endorsing the specific bill, like the 137 signatories of the letter Trump has tweeted out. They’re a pretty motley crew, many not economists at all, some apparently nonexistent, and some with, um, interesting backgrounds:

Other names on the economists’ letter may raise eyebrows. John P. Eleazarian is listed as an economist with the American Economic Association. But membership to the AEA is open to anybody who coughs up dues, and membership simply grants access to AEA journals and discounts at AEA events. Eleazarian is a former attorney who lost his law license and the ability to practice law in California after he was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison for forging a judicial signature and falsifying other documents. His current LinkedIn profile lists him as a paralegal at a law firm.

Second are people like the Nine Unprofessional Economists – all of whom have, or used to have, real professional reputations, who signed that open letter asserting that corporate tax cuts might produce rapid growth. As Jason Furman and Larry Summers pointed out, they misrepresented the research they claimed supported their position, then denied having said what they said.

The nine economists’ original Nov. 25 letterestimated that under the House and Senate proposals, “the gain in the long-run level of GDP would be just over 3 percent, or 0.3 percent per year for a decade.” … The conservative economists wrote to Summers and Furman on Thursday, saying the 3 percent growth assertion “did not offer claims about the speed of adjustment to a long-run result.”

So that’s explicit aid and comfort to tax cutters, with an extra dose of dishonesty and cowardice.

But there’s a third group, people like Greg Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, who have written in favor of the general idea of lower corporate taxes, which is OK – that’s a position one can hold in good faith, even if I disagree (and even if Mankiw at least seems to have screwed up his analysis without admitting error). But have any of them spoken out about the reality of the actual legislation, the bad analysis being offered by political figures, the corrupt political process? I may have missed some condemnations, but I haven’t seen any.

You may say that this is how everyone behaves – if your political side does bad stuff, you go silent. But it isn’t. You probably think that I’m going to offer happy stories about principled liberals – but I can do better than that. Consider a very different group of conservative intellectuals, whom I have had lots of bad things to say about in the past: neocon foreign policy types.

Nobody can accuse me of having a soft spot for the likes of William Kristol, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and others who played a role in cheerleading the Iraq War. But one must grudgingly admit that under Trump they have shown real courage: they have proved willing to criticize, harshly and even shrilly, the disastrous governance of our current regime.

On other words, the foreign-policy neocon intellectuals, however wrongheaded I may find their ideas, turn out to be men and women with real principles.

I wish I could say the same about conservative economists. But I can’t.