Milton Friedman's entire career was based on a deeper understanding of something that was simply common sense to Keynes: That money was not neutral and did matter. (Keynes wrote A Tract on Monetary Reform decades before Friedman's Monetary History of the US.) Friedman, by the way, got the story wrong on the Depression, in my opinion. It wasn't the Fed's action that caused the Depression. It was its inaction.
Supply-Side economics was not invented by Mundell and Laffer, nor was it first carried out by Reagan. It was invented by Solow and Tobin, and Kennedy put it into action in the early '60s. And, unlike Reagan's tax cuts (which were completely. fucking. useless.), Kennedy's really did help to bring an economic boom -- the largest in pre-Clinton US history -- because marginal rates were so damned high. (I'm sorry. I'm as liberal as the next guy, but 70%+ of income is just too much taxation.)
I'll give my hypothesis in a new diary, shortly. I agree with some of rdf's point, but not all of it. It's much more complex, in my opinion. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
Looking forward to reading your diary.
(Of course, you can point out that the relative academic support for global climate change has failed to persuade various parts on the right, but overall I do think that the concept of global climate change is making more headway than the idea that the Reagan years may not have been all perfect...)
I too am looking forward to your diary.
