Send in the Clowns

I'm thinking of Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and Art Laffer. They are the reliable mouthpieces of what former President George H W Bush called "Voodoo economics," and their popularity is undiminished by a record of confident predictions that turned out to be absurdly wrong. The important point is that their economics is narrowly tailored to the convenience of the super rich zillionaires who finance the right-wing propaganda institutes.

Paul Krugman gives them a few swats here.

Jonathan Chait does insults better than almost anyone; in his recent note on Larry Kudlow, he declares that

The interesting thing about Kudlow’s continuing influence over conservative thought is that he has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art.

And Chait doesn’t even mention LK’s greatest hits — his sneers at “bubbleheads” who thought something was amiss with housing prices, his warnings about runaway inflation in 2009-10, his declaration that a high stock market is a vote of confidence for the president — but only, apparently, if said president is Republican.

Immunity to fact and logic is very important cultural value for the American conservative.

And:

I don’t think it’s an accident that Kudlow still dresses like Gordon Gekko after all these years.

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