Kudlow

Menzie Chinn notes:

Mr. Kudlow is apparently on the short list for new National Economic Committee chair. Maybe a good time to review some of his macro predictions.

Yours truly goes back memory lane:

But let’s turn back the clock to the first term of the Bush43 Administration when Kudlow writing for the National Review was all in defending Bush’s fiscal stimulus and arguing at several points how the labor market was booming even when it was not. Kudlow was infamous for claiming the household survey was a better measure of employment when it showed that employment was rising while the payroll survey said the opposite. Of course there were months when the payroll survey showed better job growth than the household survey showed – to which Kudlow declared the payroll survey was more reliable. And during those months when the unemployment rate fell even though the employment-population ratio fell, Kudlow was all aglow that labor force participation rates were falling. After all, spinning for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign was more important than actual improvement in the labor market

Of course my main point was to remind us of Kudlow’s deficit dance and how Robert Novak fell for it:

OK Kudlow said this $2 trillion was a gap over 2 years so we can blame Novak by not dividing these figures by two. But Kudlow was also using annual flow information as if it were quarterly flow information. So to correct even what he wrote – we needed to further divide his figures by four. Our second graph shows the GDP gap on an annual basis using the CBO estimate of potential GDP and they were nowhere near $1 trillion per year. Could Kudlow really be this incredibly stupid or did he know he was trying to deceive stupid readers? I guess he did because Robert Novak certainly fell for this incredibly misleading and incorrect assertion.

It is sort of funny that Kudlow and Novak were making a Keynesian economics argument given both of their disdain for Keynesian economics. Of course summing 8 numbers when the right approach would be to take the average of 8 numbers is a conceptual error that one would trust a first grader could point out. It is also interesting that Kudlow wanted to assume that potential real GDP always grows at 3.5% as he is likely going to be Trump’s chief economic adviser. Trump is even bragging that Kudlow now favors tariffs. And why not – Lawrence Kudlow’s entire career has been telling any lie that his political master want him to tell as long as there is another tax cut for rich people in store.