A Classic Case of Trotskyite Thinking

My experience with Trotskyites, and I've had more than I would have preferred, having a liberal Jewish mom who grew up in New York,^* is that their beliefs are impervious to facts.

When the facts don't cooperate, you change the facts.

Well, an interesting fact is that pretty much everyone among the founders of Neoconservatism, except William F. Buckley, started off as Trotskyites.

While their beliefs had changed, their way of thinking remains in a similar form, and has infested conservatism more generally.

Case in point, the Republicans are about to introduce funny math at the Congressional Budget Office: (CBO)

After the drama of electing a new speaker of the House and the changing of control in the Senate, the House on Tuesday approved an obscure but significant rule change requiring the economic effects of legislation to be included in a bill’s official cost to the Treasury.

The change on “dynamic scoring” — ardently sought since the 1990s by Republicans — could ease passage of major tax cuts by showing that their impact on economic growth would substantially reduce their cost to the Treasury. The move is widely seen as a way for Republican leaders to set ground rules for an ambitious overhaul of the entire United States tax code.

Democrats blasted the change as “voodoo economics,” a “gamble” and “tax fraud.” Opponents said the rule change would invite politicized scorekeeping, further tilt policy to benefit the rich, and expand the budget deficit. Shaun Donovan, the White House budget director, implored the House not to “upend the level playing field that has existed for decades” and “call into question the accuracy, consistency and fairness” of congressional budget estimates.

“The basic problem remains that macroeconomic work is useful in the laboratory but not in the field,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a longtime chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, which officially tallies the cost of tax proposals. “The models are too simplistic and the range of the possible outcomes so great that it opens the process to too much in the way of political intuitions.”

Also, I would note that we had a 12 year experiment with the Laughable (Laffer) Curve, under Reagan and Bush, where the deficit exploded, and where average GDP growth was less than under Carter or Clinton. (Link)

And then there is the disaster that is Sam Brownback's Kansas.

But like any good Trotskyite, the Republicans are not going to allow facts to get in the way of their theories.

^*In fact, my older brother, AKA Bear who Swims, had a teddy bear named Bronny bear, named after Lev Davidovich Bronshtein.^†
†Don't ask him about it. The loss of the bear in the Juneau Alaska airport is one of the great traumas of his life.^‡
‡FWIW, no, Stephen is not a Trotskyite. If anything he is more disdainful of those idiots than I am.