| Description | 12:38 pm November 12, 2010, by Jay
Arthur Laffer is a famous economist with a PhD from Stanford. He is also, to some, a guru of sorts.
I, of course, am none of the above.
On the other hand, I also didn’t write the silly, myopic, Alice-in-Wonderland piece by Laffer published in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal in which he offers the following analysis of our jobless situation:
“Employment is low because the incentives for workers to work are too small, and the incentives not to work too high. Workers’ net wages are down, so the supply of labor is limited. Meanwhile, demand for labor is also down since employers consider the costs of employing new workers—wages, health care and more—to be greater today than the benefits.”
Interestingly, in Laffer’s explanation of how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it, the word “housing,” as in the bursting of the housing bubble, is never mentioned. Nor are the words “derivative” or “mortgage” or “Wall Street” or “foreclosure”.
The word “consumer,” as in the collapse of consumer demand and confidence, meaning companies have fewer people to sell to, is also never mentioned.
Instead, we get strange assertions such as: |
