Why Tyler Cowen Is Not Working for Rudy Guiliani

Someone tell Mark Thoma that he is having too much fun and that we all know RUDY is an idiot. But Tyler Cowen is very smart:

Might Reagan’s huge tax increase have had something to do with that?

Tyler is reminding the doofs that wrote this that the “near doubling of federal tax reciepts ($500 billion to $900 billion” was in part due to the increase in payroll taxes and in part due to rising prices. Incidentally, the doofs can’t even spell receipts. But this gets much worse when one turns to their source:

Nominal federal revenues doubled in the 1980s from $517 billion to $1.031 trillion.

The doofs were off by over $100 billion as to the level of total Federal revenues at the end of this period. Can’t spell, can’t read. But let’s not let William A. Niskanen and Stephen Moore off the hook either:

Real economic growth averaged 3.2 percent during the Reagan years versus 2.8 percent during the Ford-Carter years and 2.1 percent during the Bush-Clinton years.

Mind you that they wrote this in late 1996 and they likely did not see the Clinton boom taking off. After all – that 1993 tax increase was supposed to lead to economic ruin according to this crowd.