However Did an Ignorant Crank Win the Republican Presidential Nomination?

Donald Trump will be getting exceedingly appropriate advice for his tax plans:

But what’s really interesting is whom, according to Politico, Mr. Trump has brought in to revise his plans: Larry Kudlow of CNBC and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation. That news had economic analysts spitting out their morning coffee all across America.

For those who don’t follow such things, Mr. Kudlow has a record of being wrong about, well, everything. In 2005 he ridiculed “bubbleheads who expect housing-price crashes in Las Vegas or Naples, Florida, to bring down the consumer, the rest of the economy, and the entire stock market” — which was exactly what happened. In 2007 he predicted three years of “Goldilocks” prosperity. And on and on.

Mr. Moore has a comparable forecasting record, but he also has a remarkable inability to get facts straight. Perhaps most famously, he once attempted to rebut, well, me with an article detailing the supposed benefits of state tax cuts; incredibly, not one of the many numbers in that article was right.

Surely he needs to work with the Dow 36,000 guys too, but there’s still time. Krugman sees one implication of this:

But my guess is that the explanation is simpler: The candidate has no idea who is and isn’t competent. I mean, it’s not as if he has any independent knowledge of economics, or even knows what he doesn’t know. For example, he keeps asserting that America has the world’s highest taxes, when we’re actually at the bottom among advanced nations.

Obviously, this is true. And yet, as Krugman said earlier, Trump (like Moore and Kudlow) is firmly within the Republican mainstream on taxes. Whether the plans are literally crafted by Moore or Kudlow or not, every remotely viable Republican candidate for president proposes a massive upper-class tax cut paired with unspecified spending cuts and pretends that this will actually create a surplus because the plan will UNLEASH the entrepreneurial genius of the American people, just like it has in the Kansas and Louisiana miracles. Trump is probably right to just cut out the middleman.

And given this Republican consensus, the precise details don’t really matter. If Trump becomes president, he’ll sign whatever loony upper-class tax cut the Republican Congress puts on his desk. And this tax plan will be one that Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow will be very happy with. In conclusion, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.