Stephen Moore v. Donald Trump – A Brief Review

I listened to yesterday’s NABE debate. Big picture – Gene Sperling tried to have an informed discussion as Stephen Moore went all Trump with a combination of raw partisan garbage, outright lies, and just plain stupidity. If you can endure the latter – what Gene had to say may be worth the listen. Just a couple of notes. Moore was particularly bad on the macroeconomics as he sort of endorsed a return to the gold standard (“a fixed price rule”) and bashed Keynesian economics which he clearly does not understand. When he was asked about the implications on the deficit from the massive Trump tax cuts, he called the numbers from Brooking “bogus”. I expected a roar of laughter from the audience but I guess they had fallen asleep by then. For me the real laugher, however, was when he blamed the fall in coal production on liberals and regulation. I have to wonder if this group of business economists were either asleep or just being polite as no one interrupted by telling him it was market forces as in the fall in the price of natural gas that drove down the demand for coal production. Moore claimed that the coal sector does not want handouts but without a government subsidy, I don’t see coal production coming back.