You may or may not know who Arthur Laffer is. Personally, I wish I didn’t. Suffice to say, if you shoved Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore in a Vitamix with a cup of flaxseed and half a banana, you’d get a better economist than Laffer.
If you want to know more, click here. If you want to know less, well, his life pretty much boils down to: he once wrote some goofy shit on a cocktail napkin, and now the world sucks.
And Donald Trump believes him because Donald Trump will believe just about anything, so long as it’s obscenely cruel and/or racist.
So here’s what Laffer is saying now (i.e., this morning on Fox News): Barack Obama caused the Great Recession, and people with student loan debt deserve nothing but ridicule.
Newsweek:
"In March of 2020 I'm really going to look at the political world very carefully," Laffer said. "Because if you'll remember, coming into the election in 2008, when Obama started rising in the polls, and doing well in the polls, the stock market crashed, the stock market tells you what will be and not what has been. And the stock market looks forward -- If they see an Obama coming into the office they'll crash and that's what led to the Great Recession."
Laffer's revisionist economic history of the 2007 and 2008 financial crises' that led to the Great Recession made no mention of unregulated use of derivatives, the failed U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve bank bailouts, the expansion of toxic debt and subprime mortgages -- all of which occurred under Bush's administration.
Uh-huh. Of course, as excuses go, that’s right up there with Exxon blaming the residents of Valdez, Alaska, for breeding excessively oil-absorbent ducks.
And the pièce de résistance? Laffer and Fox anchor Bill Hemmer mocked Elizabeth Warren’s plan to provide student loan debt forgiveness to millions of Americans (instead of, say, throwing more money at the banks that actually caused the Great Recession).
Laffer and Hemmer added insult to injury in the Tuesday Fox News segment, appearing to mock the 45 million Americans who owe $1.5 trillion in cumulative student loan debt who Warren is seeking to relieve.
"How'd you get through college, did somebody pay for you, how'd that happen?" Hemmer asked Laffer in a jocular tone.
"Yea, my dad, mom and dad, I'm sorry. I didn't even have to pay them back either," Laffer replied with a chuckle, before agreeing he'd been financially planning since age 17. "But back then it was much cheaper. It was a lot, lot cheaper."
"Come on Art, that's the Oprah way: you get a car and you get a car," Hemmer added.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Yup, it’s exactly like that. Nothing to do with the wealthy taking more and more of the economic pie every year thanks in large part to … Arthur Laffer.
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