In case Rudy Giuliani's penchant for cross-dressing had you doubting his conservative In case Rudy Giuliani's penchant for cross-dressing had you doubting his conservative bona fides, doubt no more. "I regard myself as a supply-sider for sure," he told Larry Kudlow on March 27. And just in case you weren't clear that by "supply-sider" Giuliani meant "know-nothing fool and liar," he clarified: "[I] watched Ronald Reagan do it and learned it, saw it work. Taxes get reduced, more revenue comes in."
Taxes get reduced, more revenue comes in. That, to Giuliani, is what it means to be a supply-sider. And a supply-sider is what he proclaims himself to be.
Taxes get reduced, more revenue comes in. It's a nice idea. Nice, but not true. What's more, it's known to be untrue. Reagan did try it, but it didn't work.
Taxes get reduced, more revenue comes in. Again, this is something Republicans like to say -- but it isn't true, and people who follow politics closely all know it isn't true. Elections, however, are decided by the broad mass of voters, the vast majority of whom don't follow politics especially closely. For that, they turn to the professionals -- the corps of campaign correspondents working for the country's major newspapers and television networks.
These professionals do follow politics closely and use their years of experience in the field to write stories that provide meaningful information to their readers. Thus a person who doesn't follow politics all that closely and reads an article about how Giuliani puts a debunked theory at the heart of his economic policy will come away newly in possession of that key piece of information. "Giuliani: Crank or Liar?" reads the headline, as the author explores whether Giuliani is deliberately misleading people or just too dumb to know the truth. That's how the papers cover the story, because the papers are in the business of informing their readers about politics. It's a no-brainer.
I kid, of course.
Richard Perez-Pena reported, in a March 29 New York Times article about Steve Forbes endorsing Giuliani, that the former mayor "calls himself an advocate of supply-side economics and tells audiences that he cut taxes and restrained spending as mayor." What's supply-side economics, wonders the curious reader -- is it by any chance a crank doctrine holding that tax cuts will increase revenues? Well, Perez-Pena won't tell you.
The AP, in a similar story, noted meekly that "Giuliani, a front-runner among Republicans seeking the White House in 2008, said he and Forbes share 'an economic vision that embraces supply-side economics, tax relief, and spending restraint.'" Here, again, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination is saying he places a debunked crackpot economic theory at the heart of his agenda for the country and arguably the nation's most important news organization … doesn't see fit to explain.
No news organization remarks on the fact that Giuliani has pronounced himself a proud crank, nor does anybody remark on the news organizations not remarking on it. We've come to expect nothing better from our political coverage.
To be fair, while they flubbed the supply-side issue, both articles did mention that Steve Forbes, when he ran for president, was an advocate of a flat tax and that Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City at that time, was opposed to such a tax because it would be detrimental to the financial interests of people who live in high-tax jurisdictions, such as Giuliani's then-constituents in NYC.
Wait, no -- of course they didn't.
Both articles did note the "contradiction" between Giuliani receiving the endorsement in 2007 of someone who favored the flat tax in 1996. They didn't explain what was contradictory about this, exactly, but we know that when the press gets even the slightest whiff of a flip-flop it turns into a ravenous dog. But it was, of course, beyond the reporters' abilities while drawing attention to this alleged flip-flop to explain why a mayor of New York might have taken that view and why the decisive consideration for Giuliani at that time might not apply in the future. And, of course, we get nothing about the core principle of Giuliani's economic vision. Nothing about the fact that he claims to think the best way to increase federal revenue is to reduce federal tax rates; a policy precept that, on the one hand, is totally wrong and, on the other hand, has wide-ranging implications for politics and government.
Worth writing about? Of course not. This is campaign journalism; informing readers isn't on the agenda. Indeed, newspapers, having apparently reached the conclusion that the decline in the number of people willing to pay money for the privilege of reading them is unrelated to their incredibly low quality, simply choose not to put any relevant information at all into such coverage.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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