Saturday, July 14, 2012

Insanity at Large: George Bush Promotes a Book on Economic Growth

NYT writes:
For the first time since leaving office three and a half years ago, Mr. Bush is advancing a variety of ideas about how to jump-start economic growth by restructuring taxes, expanding trade, encouraging innovation, fixing immigration and overhauling Social Security. He wrote the foreword for the book, a collection of essays from an array of economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, and he proposes a national goal of expanding the economy by 4 percent a year on a sustained basis.

The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs,” to be unveiled by the former president in Dallas on Tuesday and published by Crown Business, is neither campaign template nor partisan screed. It is a wonky paean to free enterprise.
Of course, the economists with essays in the book, are not all free marketers.

Myron Scholes is an econometrician, who was a key part of the team that blew up the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, by using nutty econometric models.

Kevin Hassett is a total political tool. He was senior Economist, 1995-97; Economist, 1992-95, Division of Research and Statistics, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and served as an economic adviser to the George W. Bush 2004 presidential campaign and as Senator John McCain's chief economic adviser during the 2000 presidential primaries. He also served as a senior economic adviser to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign. In 1999, before the dot-com bubble burst, he wrote an idiotic book that ignored Fed manipulation of the economy called, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market

Robert Lucas also has an essay in the book. Lucas, a Nobel Prize winner, told WSJ that he was in favor of Bernanke money printing AND the Obama stimulus:
Mr. Lucas believes Ben Bernanke acted properly to prop up the system. He doesn't even find fault with Mr. Obama's first stimulus plan. "If you think Bernanke did a great job tossing out a trillion dollars, why is it a bad idea for the executive to toss out a trillion dollars? It's not an inappropriate thing in a recession to push money out there and trying to keep spending from falling too much, and we did that."
Oh yeah, that's real free market.

There's also the obligatory chapter on Social Security "reform"---which usually means increasing taxes---will see if Charles Blahous and Jason Fichtner stick to form in their chapter.

Most curious on the list of contributors to the book is Peter Klein, who lectures regularly at the Mises Institute. His topic, in what is certain to be called the Bush book on economics, is titled, Entrepreneurs and Creative Destruction. It will be fascinating to learn what Peter contributed to the book.

9 comments:

  1. Insanity?!? Bob, are you implying that the editor of the Financial Times was WRONG when he stated: "The administration of George W. Bush had probably been the most ideologically free-market administration since the 1920s." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWGGGWflq_I&list=UUByO0RpfcUgWZUtDNW4tNdQ&index=7&feature=plcp

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  2. It all reminds me of Irving Fisher. Fisher was the most celebrated economist of his day. Among his many inventions was the CPI. He also made a fortune from his invention of the rolodex. Fisher is famous for proclaiming, just before the '29 Wall Street Crash, that the economy had reached a new "permanently high plateau." He endorsed virtually everything that Herbert Hoover did and put his money where his mouth was. His money, his wife's money, and his sister-in-laws money. He lost it all in the stock market- an estimated $10 million in depression-era money.

    This newly-pauperized economist then proceeded to publish an extended essay on how to end a depression. This essay became the basis for what would become monetarism.

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  3. Thanks for posting this RW; I needed a hearty laugh right now.

    I just wonder if the former murderer-in-chiefs book will outsell the book of the wanna-be economist Paul Krugman? Seriously, WHO reads this crap?

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  4. Actually, I think this book could be very valuable in fixing the economy - IF you are watching the Seinfeld episode where George does the opposite while reading this book.

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  5. Is the book been tested on animals? For adults only?

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  6. Peter Klein has become a total douche bag, see his recent LRC blog post defending the enablers of the child molester at Penn State:

    Re: Why Is Louis Freeh Suddenly a Hero?

    Posted by Peter Klein on July 13, 2012 03:49 PM

    Bill, it's not even clear that the Freeh report is very good. Apparently the media accounts are based on the executive summary, which is highly inflammatory, rather than the text of the report, which is mostly speculation. Looks like Freeh was as careful and thorough as one of his crime labs.

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  7. GOP's plan to fix the economy:

    1. Get rid of Obama.
    2. ?????
    3. Profit!

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  8. @ evmazu
    are you implying that the editor of the Financial Times was WRONG "when he stated: "The administration of George W. Bush had probably been the most ideologically free-market administration since the 1920s."

    Maybe if you only read the speeches and the rhetoric. But if you look at what W actually did, he accelerated the construction of the American police state, started wars against countries in order to enrich his cronies, and never veered from status quo fascism that has defined the American Presidency since the 19th century.

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  9. Anonymous above calls Peter Klein "a total douche bag, see his recent LRC blog post defending the enablers of the child molester at Penn State."

    Anonymous then proceeds to post Klein's comments.

    Anonymous appears to suffer from a reading comprehension deficit. Sad, but too often the case with the amerikan soviet.

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