Via Greg Mankiw comes a discussion by Jeanne Sahadi that Senator Clinton listens to Gene Sperling (no surprise) and Senator Obama listens to Austan Goolsbee. John McCain apparently is listening to deficit hawk Douglas Holtz-Eakin who appears to be more willing to use entitlement cuts than tax increases to restore fiscal sanity.
On this score – I’d prefer those listening to Sperling or Goolsbee but let’s all pray that McCain does not listen to Lawrence Kudlow:
This is one reason why my idea of a McCain dollar could be very important. A stronger greenback would reduce inflation. Cutting corporate taxes, as well as reforming the entire tax code, might also help.
That’s right boys and girls – let’s go with tight money to lower inflation as we adopt fiscal stimulus to get us back to full employment. Sort of what I criticized in the update to this post:
Isn’t this the macroeconomic policy mix during 1981 that gave us a collapse of net exports from an overly strong dollar (something Kudlow endorses) and the 1982 recession? Of course, we could have a massive fiscal stimulus with little in the way of tight money, which might be inflationary if Buiter is even remotely correct about the labor market. Leave it to a clown like Kudlow to endorse such a disastrous policy mix!
Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t Kudlow one of the village idiots that convinced Reagan to go along with this insane macroeconomic policy mix. While Reagan was an economics major, McCain has admitted that he knows little about economics. So why would a President McCain be more willing to listen to Douglas Holtz-Eakin than to free lunch village idiots like Lawrence Kudlow?
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