Matt Lauer was publicly roasted last week after he failed to hold Donald Trump to account during the "Commander in Chief Candidates Forum", but Lauer isn't the only media personality - or "news person," whatever that means these days - who needs to step up his game and press guests to tell the truth.
We shouldn't just be demanding tougher treatment of presidential debate candidates.
We should be demanding that interviewers in the media start calling out so-called "experts" when the experts are caught distorting the truth.
Earlier this morning for example,
Morning Joe hosted one of Donald Trump's informal economic advisors, Larry Kudlow, who revealed this shocking revelation about who really was the first president to use "supply side economics", also known as trickledown "Reaganomics"
There's just one major, glaring problem with Kudlow's analysis.
It's not true.
John F. Kennedy didn't invent trickle-down Reaganomics, and his policies had nothing to do with trickle-down Reaganomics.
Kudlow wasn't entirely wrong when he said that Kennedy suggested we should cut marginal income taxes rates, Kennedy's plan cut the lowest earners' taxes from 20 percent to 14 percent, and it cut the highest earners' taxes from 91% to 65%.
But the Kennedy tax code also closed a series of loopholes and tax exceptions, so the overall effect was that the government took in more tax revenue than before the "cuts"
It was, in other words, a tax hike.
And he made it explicitly clear during his
third debate against Richard Nixon that his changes to the tax code would increase tax revenue, the definition of a tax increase, and wouldn't be offset by gutting government spending.
So why is Larry Kudlow out peddling this bogus notion that John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, actually invented supply side economics?
It's probably because the early 60s was pretty much the only time in 20th century American history that cutting the top tax rate has coincided with an increase in real economic growth.
As Mehrun Etebari pointed out back in 2003 at
www.faireconomy.org, there are at least
four simple pieces of evidence that show that trickle-down economics doesn't work.
