Trump loves award ceremonies as much as he hates celebrity roasts.
Individual-1 has been giving out Medals of Freedom like Peter Principle prizes but without boxes of Cracker Jack.
Arthur Laffer joins the posse of GOP toadies getting awards no less ignominious or reduced in significance than the made-up Sumo trophy Individual-1 gave out in Tokyo this week. No truth to the rumor that the award ceremony will include a pageant walk or swimsuit component.
One can only surmise that Individual-1 likes brand-building in the spirit of eponymity, where ‘Trumponomics’ might be considered a theory like Reaganomics, only even more more kleptocratic in its grifting and kakistocratic in its management style.
Laffer might not be a familiar figure to many of Trump’s 40 million Twitter followers, but the former economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan is a giant within the Republican Party as the “godfather” of supply-side economics, the theory that cutting taxes and regulations creates economic growth (a cousin to trickle-down economics, which argues more specifically for tax cuts for the rich). In reality, though, Laffer is a Svengali or huckster who holds unconscionable influence on one of America’s two major parties, despite his ideas having been discredited—and not only by critics on the left—from the very beginning. That Trump and other Republican policymakers are promoting Laffer’s disproven theory yet again is the most damning evidence of the party’s intellectual rot.
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Laffer has branched into writing children's books along with Michelle A. Balconi. In 2014 they co-wrote "Let’s Chat About Economics." The second title in the series, "Let’s Chat About Democracy", was released in late 2017.[43]
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A September 2009 article in The National titled "A noble side to Ig Nobels" says that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs.[10] For instance, in 2006, a study showing that one of the malaria mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae) is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and the smell of human feet[11] earned the Ig Nobel Prize in the area of biology. As a direct result of these findings, traps baited with this cheese have been placed in strategic locations in some parts of Africa to combat the epidemic of malaria.[12][13]
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