What a Laffer

I don't know how I missed this a year or so ago. But I find it a small revelation.

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=880f4273-e2d6-4914-b15b-ffcce401155a

Now, I admit that I really don't follow the evolution of wingnut theories. Mainly because they are all, simply by definition, idiotic and laughable and devoid of intellectual heft, logic, and ethics. And so, I really had no idea how the idiotic, laughable, and logically and ethically challenged theory of supply side economics came about or who Laffer really was. I recently caught a segment of Real Time with Bill Maher on which Laffer was a guest. And all I could think was, this is the loon that Reaganomics hung its hat on? Seriously? Because, not only is his economic "theory" the stupidest thing this student of Econ1/Econ2 ever read, but he is seriously deranged as a personality. I mean, no kidding. The guy reminded me of the denizens of the ward in which I visited my brother when we had him involuntarily hospitalized. Super weird, laughing at everything and nothing at all, and trying to pretend he had nothing to do with any of the Republican policies that he inspired. He is a supremely unsettling and uncomfortable personality, leaving you amused by his alien-ness while, in equal measure, scared to death that anyone took him seriously.

And today, a link that gives me pretty much all the missing pieces (for me, anyway) in the story of how we got to where we are today, economically speaking. I've been railing against Reaganomics for decades now, knowing Laffer and his curve were a part of it. But never knowing that, horror of horrors, he and his curve were the entire underpinning, not just one of many. I knew back in the late 70s that supply side economics was a joke of a theory and felt that even calling it a theory was giving it too much credit. But reading this and finding out how all this silliness ensconced as "serious thinking" among "serious people" became the guiding economic principle right up until it all fell like the house of cards I always knew it to be, I can no longer accept anyone ever claiming that Republicans and neo-cons are serious people with any intellectual heft or credibility. I should have known this, I guess, but better late than never.