With Friends Like These...

Ugh. In the course of a pretty good column on taxes and the economy, Boskin proceeds to destroy his credibility with a stupid claim. "The lower marginal tax rates in the 1980s led to the best quarter-century of economic performance in American history." I mean, is he trying to convince people that tax-cut enthusiasts are just charlatans? We can support lowering tax rates without resorting to this sort of thing, people.

Grasping Reality?

Ha!
"Megan McArdle's major problem is that she is looking at one table--Table 1.1 in OMB's Historical Tables. She is not reading Hoover's Budget Messages" (it goes on like this).
Translation: McArdle's problem is she is looking at the data instead of the rhetoric.
Really? This is the best you can do, Professor? If you want to claim that spending should have increased a lot more than it did, or that Congress tried to increase spending by more than actually happened, or that Hoover tried to cut spending, or that his tax increases were contractionary, that's all fine and defendable, and probably true. Lines of criticism of McArdle along those lines I have no problem with. However, the evidence is crystal clear, government spending under Hoover went up, and claims that cuts in spending exacerbated the Great Depression are false. Grasp reality, not ideology.