"You know how they just love to say, “I’m not a scientist?” as a way to explain ignoring climate science? Well, they aren’t economists, either."

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COMMENTS:
*  I look at it as a good litmus test:  If anyone uses the words 'supply side', 'reducing taxes increases revenues' or 'Laffer' in a serious manner indicating they believe any of these things work, I can safely ignore their political and economic opinions as being completely wrong.
*  ... Supply side economics is a fairy tale told by the elitists to the childish population who actually think the supply siders know what they're talking about, a bucket of economic swill produced at the hands of the elitists, oligarchs, and anti-democratic forces.
*  Any one with a working brain knows tax cuts for the wealthy causes debt, deficit and economic losses. So far the Bush tax cuts cost America 6.6 trillion in revenue. If tax cuts for the rich (the “job creators”) works so well why didn’t the economy take off after the Bush Tax Cuts? Instead it created one of the worst economic decades in history. Many called it “The Decade From Hell.” And yet, Republicans WILL NOT LET GO of this failed policy. It’s literally destroying our country. Paul Ryan is out peddling it right now. They’ll roll it out in 2014 and 2016 AGAIN! Reaganomics is a failure. Trickle down economics is a failure. Supply side economics is a failure. It’s been a failure for 33 years. What is it going to take for people to clue in? The complete collapse of the country? By then it will be too late. 
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The right’s new war on truth: Math, reality, and the real reason Fox News economics can’t be trusted

Yet another reason why when conservatives do the math, deficits explode and you'd better check for your wallet

By Paul Rosenberg, January 7, 2015

“I used the phrase ‘charlatans and cranks’ in the first edition of my principles textbook to describe some of the economic advisers to Ronald Reagan, who told him that broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue. I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don’t. “  — Greg Mankiw, chair of the G.W. Bush Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), advisor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.

Ever since Reagan’ 1980 election campaign, it’s been an article of faith among movement conservatives that tax cuts pay for themselves. They don’t of course. The evidence is overwhelming, and economists across the political spectrum—even top Republican advisors such as Greg Mankiw, quoted above—have said so repeatedly over the years. But that’s the thing about articles of faith—they don’t depend on evidence at all, they depend on belief. And believing that tax cuts pay for themselves has been a pretty successful political strategy, regardless of the less-than-steller economic results. (Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 were supposed to pay for themselves, so were Bush’s 20 years later. Both created massive deficits instead.)  That political success is why Time’s Justin Fox found such widespread enthusiasm for the idea among top GOP politicos in late 2007:

If there’s one thing that Republican politicians agree on, it’s that slashing taxes brings the government more money. “You cut taxes, and the tax revenues increase,” President Bush said in a speech last year. Keeping taxes low, Vice President Dick Cheney explained in a recent interview, “does produce more revenue for the Federal Government.” Presidential candidate John McCain declared in March that “tax cuts … as we all know, increase revenues.” His rival Rudy Giuliani couldn’t agree more. “I know that reducing taxes produces more revenues,” he intones in a new TV ad.

Economist Mark Thoma took note that the notion was still alive and well with some GOP Senate candidates in October 2010, despite the fact that “the Bush tax cuts did not even come close to paying for themselves,” and actually “cost us around $1.7 trillion in revenue from 2001 through 2008.” Two years later, Media Matters noted that both Romney and Gingrich were on board with the idea in 2012, and CBS treated it as “an open question’—despite the fact that Mankiw and a bevy of other Republican economists they cited dismissed it in no uncertain terms.

So now that the GOP has got control of both houses of Congress, what can we expect in the way of economic thinking? Hear’s [sic] a hint: You know how they just love to say, “I’m not a scientist?” as a way to explain ignoring climate science? Well, they aren’t economists, either. And the consequences won’t just be seen in the form of ludicrous economic proposals—that would be too easy. Besides, they’ve already been doing that for years—decades, actually. Instead, they’re looking to use their ideological fairytale to skew all the official government calculations that Congress uses to guide its deliberations. So it’s not just the content of their economic proposals that are headed even more deeply into  cloud cukooland, it’s the entire context in which Congress thinks about economics that’s about to exit, stage right, from reality-land.

[Major snippage: please read the rest here]
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