In the interminable intellectual scuffle over the chicken-or-egg question of supply or demand, one can be forgiven for interpreting the political Right's obsession with throwing piles of money at the rich as class warfare denuded of its accustomed camouflage. After all, the bumbling, self-serving machinations of cartoonish conservatives like Eric Cantor -- who recently acheived Clarence Thomas levels of chutzpah by serving as the House Republicans' chief debt ceiling negotiator while simultaneously openly shorting Treasuries -- simply do not inspire any confidence that these are people who wouldn't fall for the banana in the tailpipe. These aren't statesmen we're dealing with, they're used car salesmen with better tailors.
But located within this nexus of dumb and greedy evident in men like Cantor, or his precursor, Dick Cheney, is a kernel of motivation to power. This is the opening that provides every opportunity for criminally incompetent nutbars like Art Laffer, fanatical evangelist like Jude Wanniski, and cynical Svengalis like Irving Kristol to create the white space of doubt they need to affect wildly implausible mutations of thought within the staid and steady practice of measuring capital and calculating scarcity. In this bizarro world of top-only indicators, it's not class warfare when there's really only one class that matters. In the modern Republican Party's reckoning, to shield this Galtian upper class of economic supermen from any financial impingement is to ensure the future of the only part of the country that could possibly matter.
And yet, while the wormy germ that sprouted the new-old beasty known as supply-side economics spung into being on a Two Continents Restaurant cocktail napkin in the Fall of 1974, the underlying debate flows from an agreement as old as modern economics itself.
Which comes first, supply or demand?
Economics is a science, and make no mistake, there's math involved. Of course, where the option to engage the world as it is with math presents, the possibilities for self-delusion manifest in inverse proportion in its antithesis, wingnut math. The difference between the two is sometimes hard to parse without a deep knowledge of the subject, or a little educated observation. Math is a discipline that encourages complexity, that rewards precision, punishes generality, and invites interrogation. By contrast, wingnut math is simplified, concepts like average and median are interchangeable, specificity is discouraged. To the faithful, devotion to predetermined outcomes is the shibboleth.
But, despite their vociferous opposition to all things communal in spirit or egalitarian in practice, wingnuts that aspired to append their title with "mathematician" were stymied by the historical and unspinnable fact that loosening regulation on business and lowering taxes on the wealthy never yielded anything but privation for the government and pain for the populace. As has always been the case, right-of-Ghengis conservatives couldn't sell their ideas to a population grown accustomed to decent wages and stable economy. They had a will to power, a drive to rein in the unwashed masses pressing too close to universal prosperity, but they lacked a winning message, and for that they needed a plausible structure, something that looked authoritative, an academic skeleton upon which they could affix the meat of their zombie lies to give it shape unfamiliar to the millions of Americans to whom Herbert Hoover's Great Depression was an unforgivable abdication of government to provide for the General Welfare. And so, they waited for a hero.
With the introduction of the water-is-wet oversimplification depicted by Laffer's eponymous parabola, a new-to-you economic theory was born to jet across the land pulling the old Reverse Robin Hood con that closely resembled the effect of Hoover's lessaiz-faire policies, which so exacerbated the effects of Black Friday and helped ensure the long night of the Great Depression. Hoover refused to aid the states with the Federal government's powers because he firmly believed in the power of private industry to overcome the economic malaise (sound familiar?). Instead of the expected recovery, the average American experienced either crushing unemployment, or uncontestable salary decreases as the remaining factories reduced their labor expenses in a buyer's market.
Supply-side economics can be defined as simply as this: give an elite upper class as much incentive and freedom as you can to produce more goods and services, and in turn they will create jobs that will provide wages to purchase those goods and services. The fact that this experiment has resulted in falling wages for men, higher crime rates, a concentration of wealth at the upper end, and no shared prosperity of any kind has not deterred the faithful. Motivated reasoning can overcome any factual obstacle, and so supply-siders keep on keeping on.
Contemporary economists have all but dismissed supply-side as a regrettable side trip into experimental territory that proved disasterously wrong. Repeated stories have emerged declaring that no serious person can ever make the supply-side argument again. It's done. Over. Everybody now knows that demand creates supply, that the US economy is 70 percent consumption, and that demand is king. Everyone, that is, but Republican congressman who are still clinging with faith forged by the damnation promised in Tea Party primaries to the notion that despite all evidence to the contrary, taxing the rich will somehow crash the economy, while government spending is killing the economy. All of which is nothing new. This has been going on a long, long time.
The rumors of supply-side's death are greatly (and repeatedly) exaggerated. When Keynes proved that supply doesn't create its own demand, proto-wingnut mathematicians went into 30 years of hibernation before Laffer claimed that tax cuts paid for themselves. When the CBO cut off that second head, supply-siders began using a Frank Luntz crafted talking point: "job creators." Since that proved to be bunk in the current recession, they've gone back to saying tax cuts pay for themselves.
All of which is to say, to an ideology that cannot simply come out and say what they want to do to the country, who have no ideas that don't involved screwing over 99 percent of the people that make up the economy, only one thing remains in a toolkit that's been pared down by repeated brushes with reality over the past 80 years, wingnut math. And unfortunately, it seems to be working just fine.