"Who founded EPI?
EPI was founded by a group of economic policy experts that includes Jeff Faux, EPI's first president; economist Barry Bluestone of Northeastern University; Robert Kuttner, columnist for Business Week and Newsweek and editor of The American Prospect; Ray Marshall, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas-Austin; Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at Brandeis University; and economist Lester Thurow of the MIT Sloan School of Management."
Not one of these clowns is a real economist with any genuine intellectual heft. That list is a joke.
Now there's an objective bunch. </sarcasm>
The fallacies in this article are in the conclusions, not the statistics.
If Liberals had it there way, they'd increase government spending by redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. No jobs will have been created, and a great deal of the money given to the poor will end up in China.
Defense spending is one of the few legitimate expenses for the Federal Government. It does in fact create jobs, and it produces actual real products and services. Social spending produces very little and results in no new investments.
The very first number cited by the article is probably the tax revenues that would've been collected over the last 4 years, assuming that the degree, breadth, and scope of the economic recovery following 9/11 had nothing to do with the tax cuts. This is a fallacious assumption and a disingenuous attempt to disconnect the economic recovery from the very real effects of the tax cuts on the sales of durable goods.
Even if a lot of the jobs created were government jobs or related to government spending, it doesn't cause the economic recovery to cease to exist. Tax revenues are growing at a faster pace than their pre-tax cut rates. The tax burden has shifted more heavily onto the wealthy and the well to-do with the middle class and poorer citizens paying a smaller portion of the total tax pie than before the tax cuts.
This reminds me of that NYT's economist... What's his name? The one who writes all the books full of facts and statistics, but when it comes to writing his conclusions and his interpretations, the facts and stats go right out the window and he basically paraphrases the Socialist Party. He's required reading in some University of Hawaii economics classes.
What economist doesn't believe tax cuts stimulate the economy? That's one of the basic tenets of economics.
Are these people serious?
I don't recognize but one name, Robert Reich, but it's enough to discount the rest of the article. Just checked the one from the LBJ School of Public Affairs; he worked for Carter and Clinton and is a graduate of Berkeley. Won't bother checking on the others.