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conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, the supply-side champion who wrote the manifesto for the Reagan Revolution. Bartlett became a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House and a top official at the Treasury Department under the first George Bush. Yet for all those credentials, he is today an outcast from the very conservative ranks where he was once so influential. That’s because Bruce Bartlett dared to write a book criticizing the second George Bush as a pretend conservative who slashed taxes but still spent with wild abandon...

BRUCE BARTLETT: Clearly, ideology has a great deal to do with it. The conservative side of our political spectrum has had an outsized voice over the last few years. I think especially since the establishment of Fox News, which has created an echo chamber in which people just hear the same ideas repeated ad infinitum.

And you know, it's just basic advertising, basically. You hear the same idea over and over again. Or you can call it propaganda if you like. It's broadly believed and people just keep saying these things all the time, that ‘Rich people create jobs.’ ‘Yes, rich people create jobs.’ ‘They're motivated primarily by taxation.’ ‘Yes, they're motivated by taxation.’ ‘We must cut their taxes.’ ‘Yes, we must cut their taxes.’

BILL MOYERS: Becomes a mantra.

BRUCE BARTLETT: That's right. Year after year after year of people watching Fox News and listening to talk radio, had conditioned them in advance to believe that the government is responsible for all of our problems.

BILL MOYERS: Your old boss, Ronald Reagan, said government is the problem, not the solution. And Bill Clinton, Democrat, echoed that refrain when he was in office.

BRUCE BARTLETT: One idea that a friend of mine, Mike Lofgren came up with, is that the conservative side of this political spectrum hates government, per se. And it's in their interest to make it be ineffective. And so, they'll cut the budget, for example, for a regulatory agency such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

And then, when some problem arises on Wall Street, they will then say, ‘Ha-ha, this proves that the SEC doesn't work.’ And this will justify further cuts in the agency's budget, so that everything that they do reinforces their basic ideology, which is that government is the source of all of our problems. Government doesn't work. And then they make sure that it doesn't work by cutting its budget and tying its hands so that everything is a race to the bottom and it didn't use to be that way.

Ivytalk wrote:That reminds me: I left Bill Moyers off my Death Pool post in the Locker Room!

kalm wrote:

Ivytalk wrote:That reminds me: I left Bill Moyers off my Death Pool post in the Locker Room!

You're just upset because your boys Moore and Norquist pale in their understanding of simple math compared to Bartlett and Stockman.

kalm wrote:

Ivytalk wrote:That reminds me: I left Bill Moyers off my Death Pool post in the Locker Room!

You're just upset because your boys Moore and Norquist pale in their understanding of simple math compared to Bartlett and Stockman.

CitadelGrad wrote:

kalm wrote:
You're just upset because your boys Moore and Norquist pale in their understanding of simple math compared to Bartlett and Stockman.

You want to talk simple math? Look up federal revenue in 1980, then compare that number to federal revenue in 1988.

JohnStOnge wrote:You don't think rich people, in general, create jobs? Like if you line everybody up from poorest to richest, you don't think there's going to be a correlation between how rich someone is and how many jobs are generated through their activity?

I don't think people believe that because Fox News tells them to believe it. I think they believe it because it's obvious.

kalm wrote:

CitadelGrad wrote:
You want to talk simple math? Look up federal revenue in 1980, then compare that number to federal revenue in 1988.

What was the spending like?

kalm wrote:

JohnStOnge wrote:You don't think rich people, in general, create jobs? Like if you line everybody up from poorest to richest, you don't think there's going to be a correlation between how rich someone is and how many jobs are generated through their activity?

I don't think people believe that because Fox News tells them to believe it. I think they believe it because it's obvious.

Demand creates jobs.

CitadelGrad wrote:

kalm wrote:
Demand creates jobs.

The combination of investment capital and technological advancement creates jobs. It has been that way since the earliest days of the industrial revolution.

What was the demand for personal computers before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates?

Although he (Steve Jobs) dropped out after only one semester,[21] he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.[22] Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."[22]

kalm wrote:

JohnStOnge wrote:You don't think rich people, in general, create jobs? Like if you line everybody up from poorest to richest, you don't think there's going to be a correlation between how rich someone is and how many jobs are generated through their activity?

I don't think people believe that because Fox News tells them to believe it. I think they believe it because it's obvious.

Demand creates jobs.

Cluck U wrote:

kalm wrote:
Demand creates jobs.

No, it doesn't.