Oh, it's more than that.
Jesus Christ. Trump's kind of guy.
And Herman Cain withdrew his name from consideration.
Good with numbers.Moore’s primary area of pseudo-expertise — he is not an economist — is fiscal policy. He is a dedicated advocate of supply-side economics, relentlessly promoting his fanatical hatred of redistribution and belief that lower taxes for the rich can and will unleash wondrous prosperity. Like nearly all supply-siders, he has clung to this dogma in the face of repeated, spectacular failures.
I first started writing about Moore in 1997. Four years before, President Clinton had raised the top tax rate to 39.6 percent, and supply-siders had insisted this would without question cause tax revenues to drop. This prediction was a necessary corollary of supply-side economic theory, which holds that tax revenue moves in the opposite direction of the top tax rate. The prediction was spectacularly wrong — revenue not only rose, it rose much, much faster than even the most optimistic advocates of Clinton’s plan had predicted.
Most supply-siders simply ignored this fact altogether. Moore, somewhat unusually, attempted to defend the original failed prognostication. His effort was hilariously buffoonish, using a series of errors that would embarrass a high-school economics student, such as failing to correct for inflation, and combining payroll tax data with income tax data.
NYMag
Which is why he's being nominated.He is capable of writing entire columns that contain no true facts at all. He made so many factual errors he achieved the rare feat of being banned from the pages of a Midwestern newspaper [the Kansas City Star]. He has sold his policy elixir to state governments which have promptly experienced massive fiscal crises as a direct result of listening to him. He believes what he calls “the heroes of the economy: the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the one who innovates and creates the things we want to buy” should be lionized, and that the idea that a recession might be caused by anything other than excessively high rates on these heroes defies “common sense.” He was pulled into Trump’s orbit during the 2016 campaign and co-wrote a ludicrous hagiography of Trump and his agenda.
Never back down. Shows weakness.And yet, for all their extravagant ignorance, Moore’s beliefs on fiscal policy are actually more sophisticated and well-developed than his views on monetary policy. It is the latter that he would be in a position to influence as a Federal Reserve governor.
[...]
During the Obama presidency, he warned that runaway government spending would produce hyperinflation. In 2009, he appeared on Glenn Beck’s program to wax hysteric. “We’ve seen this happened to Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Russia, all consumed by government, all do-gooders — some of that led to the decline of their civilizations,” he said.
[...]
Had Moore’s advice been followed, it would have led to a quick end to the recovery and a deep recession. It did, however, dovetail with the Republican Party’s political imperative of encouraging contractionary fiscal and monetary policy, in order to slow down or strangle the recovery.
Since Donald Trump moved into the White House, the Republican Party has reversed its views on both fiscal and monetary policy. Whereas it had previously deemed deficits and inflation a mortal threat, and called stimulus and lower interest rates counterproductive, the party line now demands both.
[...]
[Moore] has insisted on television that the economy is experiencing deflation, and when corrected by panelist Catherine Rampell on this unambiguous error of fact, refused to give ground.
Which is why the Senate will confirm him.Moore has extremely strong partisan instincts and extremely limited analytical skills. The combination results inevitably in the latter giving way to the former.
[...]
The problem is that he has no grasp of the policy, and simply follows whatever line helps the Republican Party.
P.S. He bites?
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