Kevin McCarthy, Meet Lester Thurow

A bad conservative idea was once a bad liberal idea advocated by the superstar liberal economist of 1981.

Remember Lester Thurow (1938-2016)? He was a superstar liberal economist in the early 1980s. He wrote a Newsweek column that alternated with a column written by Milton Friedman. He was our guy, and he was really smart, and he wrote in clear, understandable prose. His The Zero-Sum Society (1980) helped reorient economics towards questions of distribution and inequality at a time when the orthodox view was that inequality was the price we had to pay for economic growth (which turned out to be bullshit). Thurow mostly faded from public view after he became dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 1987.

Thurow was a big advocate of a broad-based consumption tax. Not his finest hour. Yes, the idiot Republican idea of 2023, now called the Fair Tax, was once the idiot Democratic idea of 1981. In fairness to Thurow, his consumption tax wasn’t quite so idiotic as the one that Kevin McCarthy agreed to bring to the House floor as a condition of being allowed to become House speaker. Still, I’m surprised that Republicans are unaware of their Big Idea’s Camembert-and-Chardonnay libtard pedigree.

My latest New Republic piece explains why the Fair Tax is such a bad idea, both substantively and politically, making Democrats rejoice that the GOP has taken it off their hands. Please read it here.