The Left misrepresents conservatives’ views

Idon’t know who gets to hold President Biden’s cell phone these days, but whoever runs his Twitter account has been hyperactive. The past few days have seen a blizzard of tweets attacking all the left’s usual targets from Republicans and business to their old favorite “trickle-down economics.”

This is a grotesque misrepresentation of what conservatives stand for. In over 30 years in the policy wonk world, I have not once heard a conservative use the term “trickle-down economics” to describe their strategy.

The term itself was invented by the Left in the 1930s to misrepresent Cal Coolidge’s economic strategy. Neither then, nor now, do conservatives believe that the way to make poor people richer is to make rich people even richer.

Conservatives believe in cutting taxes across the board to the benefit of everyone — which is why in states like Mississippi, conservatives have been so proactive in cutting income taxes for the broad mass of working people.

This has not stopped the Left from repeatedly using the term to mischaracterize what conservatives actually stand for. It is a form of misinformation, up there alongside various other conspiracy theories. Indeed, one should regard people who make excitable claims about “trickledown economics” in much the same way that one might regard people who make excitable claims about QAnon or microchips in the water.

Ronald Reagan was attacked for “trickle-down economics” in the 1980s, despite doing more than almost any other president to reduce the tax burden on those with the lowest incomes. That did not stop President Bill Clinton, who was able to run a budget surplus thanks to President Reagan’s tax cuts the previous decade, from also using the term in the 1990s. How should the Right respond? Keep cutting taxes for everyone. The Left is always going to use the myth of “trickledown economics” to attack conservatives. The past century or so shows that they will relentlessly misrepresent — especially when there’s an election looming. But the “trickle down” attack only ever gains traction when we stop cutting taxes (See President Bush the Elder’s one-term career for details). Keep on cutting.

Douglas Carswell is the president & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. This commentary was provided to the News-Press by The Center Square, a nonprofit dedicated to journalism.

“But if a crowd is big enough and diverse enough,” says Mr. Surowiecki, you just have access to so much more knowledge than you do if you ask an expert or even a team of experts. We saw this on the old TV program, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” A contestant could call an expert or poll the audience. “Experts” might be geniuses. TV audiences definitely weren’t experts, but they got the answers right more often than “experts.” Defense Department officials once wanted to use the same principle to open a market that might predict where a terrorist attack might take place. But then some ignorant senators called the idea “grotesque.”

The Defense Department dropped the idea. Today politicians are killing another good idea: PredictIt. org. It’s a website that lets Americans bet on elections, like a political futures market. As I write, PredictIt’s bettors say Joe Biden has a 27% chance of being our next president; Ron DeSantis has a 21% chance; Donald Trump has a 20% chance.

That’s useful information. But American bureaucrats working at a dreary agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission want it shut down.

Why? Did PredictIt steal user funds? No. Did they lie to people? No. Harm anyone? No!

In fact, its odds are cited by

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