Fred Thompson’s Economic Advisor

I was wondering if Fred Thompson would adopt a more honest fiscal policy message than we have heard from Rudy McRomney. The Siamese triplet known that I have called Rudy McRomney (OK – someone else coined this term) wants you to believe we can return to fiscal responsibility without tax increases even though it wants us to increase defense spending. It’s the usual free lunch nonsense we hear from the likes of Robert Novak who has some news for us:

Lawrence Lindsey, George W. Bush’s issues adviser in the 1999-2000 run-up to his presidential candidacy, is poised to play a similar role in Fred Thompson’s imminent campaign.

Just lovely. Lindsey preached his brand of free lunch economics to both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. On foreign policy, it’s vote Republican or die. On fiscal policy, it’s vote Republican because we lie to you.

Update: Greg Mankiw has some nice things to say about Lawrence Lindsey but he also adds this:

Some of my Harvard colleagues get annoyed when they see descriptions such as Novak’s. Larry was never a full professor at Harvard, which is a tenured position; he was an assistant professor, and perhaps an associate professor, which are untenured positions. As one of my senior colleagues put it to me, “If someone was a vice president of a bank, would it be accurate to report that he was president of the bank?” My own view is that the hierarchical distinctions of academic rank do not loom large in the minds of people outside the academy, so Novak’s small degree of sloppiness here is fully excusable.

I guess some would say it is not excusable for a real reporter to be this sloppy, but then I never confused Robert Novak as being a real reporter.