Tag: stephen moore
Trump Economic Adviser Says Americans Should Wear ‘Space Suits’ To Reopen Economy

Trump Economic Adviser Says Americans Should Wear ‘Space Suits’ To Reopen Economy

A member of Donald Trump's task force to reopen the American economy suggested putting every American in a "space outfit" to safely get back to work.

"I was thinking this morning, and this is just kind of a thought experiment because I was thinking about this — why don't we just put everybody in a space outfit or something like that? No. Seriously," conservative economist Stephen Moore said in an interview with the New York Times.

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Trump Withdraws Moore Fed Nomination With Abrupt Tweet

Trump Withdraws Moore Fed Nomination With Abrupt Tweet

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

It’s a sad story of two nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who were never really nominees at all.

President Donald Trump announced that CNN analyst Stephen Moore and former presidential candidate Herman Cain would be his next picks for Fed. Both are personal supporters of the president and, not coincidentally, they are both right-wing hacks with wacky — and often blatantly wrong — views of economics. Both also had disturbing personal histories, which appears to be what tanked both of their nominations — nominations that were never even officially sent to the Senate.

The tanking of Moore’s nomination on Thursday was particularly humiliating for a man Trump supposedly considers a friend. Early in the day, Bloomberg News published a story about Moore projecting confidence about his chances for confirmation.

“I’m all in,” Moore had told the outlet.

“My biggest ally is the president,” he said. “He’s full speed ahead.”

Just about two hours later, Trump ended his hopes for the role on Twitter.

Of course, the writing had been on the wall for days, and there was always reason to believe his nomination would be a struggle. In the past week, senators were openly talking about his dwindling chances, citing his misogynistic comments, racism, and dubious financial history — including unpaid taxes and alimony.

Cain, too, has a damaging history — there have been at least four different allegations of sexual harassment against him. Cain retained a small measure of his dignity by at least appearing to withdrawn voluntarily from consideration, rather than being directly undercut by the president.

Somewhat unfortunately, though, it didn’t seem that Moore’s and Cain’s rank partisanship and unfounded economic beliefs would have been enough to disqualify them on their own. This raises concerns about whether Trump may be able to successfully put forward other charlatans for the Fed if they happen to have less baggage.

 

The Very Strange Case Of Stephen Moore

The Very Strange Case Of Stephen Moore

What can you say about Stephen Moore? That his economic views tend toward the nutty, and his research is a slop job? That his juvenile fear of females borders on the pathetic — and that he didn’t find them too embarrassing to air? That he’s Donald Trump’s pick to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors? Yes, but we repeat ourselves.

Fed board members have been liberal, and they have been conservative. Many no doubt harbored sexist views. But there was never a nominee who wrote things like, “No one seems to care much that coed sports is doing irreparable harm to the psyche of America’s little boys.”

He doesn’t like grown-up coed play, either. He called letting women join men in pickup games a “travesty.” (Just wondering what business it is of his whether men choose to play sports with women.)

Something must have happened to the poor lad. Did some girl beat him at pingpong in the third grade?

Were he a star economist, we might avert our eyes from the strangeness of his social scribbles. But Moore’s economic musings are off the wall as well. He’s supported a return to the gold standard. He predicted that George W. Bush’s policies would lead to an economic golden age and that inflation would soar under Barack Obama. Wrong and wrong.

Then there’s his “scholarship.” I used to cite studies from The Heritage Foundation when the conservative think tank was producing solid research. Then Heritage sold its soul to the partisan swamp, out of which Moore rose as Heritage’s chief economist.

Under that title, he submitted a column in 2014 so shot through with error that The Kansas City Star vowed to never publish him again.

His thesis was that low taxes produce explosive job growth. As evidence, Moore wrote that “over the last five years,” no-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs while high-tax California lost jobs. For the same reasons, Florida added hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs.

Whoops. He wasn’t using numbers from the previous five years but from December 2007 to 2012. But even those numbers were wrong. In fact, Texas gained not a million but 497,400 jobs. Florida actually lost 461,500 jobs during that period — while New York gained 75,900 jobs.

“He seemed OK with a correction,” Miriam Pepper, then the Star’s editorial page editor, told me. “But as we dug deeper he got more difficult, then hostile.” She added: “I’m surprised Heritage isn’t embarrassed.”

There are smart fabricators and dumb ones. Only the dimwitted would try to pass off stats that any boy — or girl — with basic computer skills could have countered with a visit to the Bureau of Labor Statistics site.

In his personal finances, Moore is a double deadbeat. He owes more than $75,000 in unpaid taxes. And a court held him in contempt for not paying his ex-wife $300,000 as part of a divorce agreement.

This is the man who brooded: “What are the implications of a society in which women earn more than men? We don’t really know, but it could be disruptive to family stability. If men aren’t the breadwinners, will women regard them as economically expendable?”

Moore the breadwinner is also Moore the stud. Allison Moore’s 2010 divorce complaint noted that he had created a Match.com account and had an affair. She says he told her and their children, “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.”

Add Moore’s economic ignorance to his arrested development and you have a highly flawed character. May the Federal Reserve Board — and the public it serves — be spared his presence.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Trump nominee to the Federal Reserve Board.

Fed Pick Moore ‘Joked’ About AIDS, Mangled Corpses, And Abused Wife

Fed Pick Moore ‘Joked’ About AIDS, Mangled Corpses, And Abused Wife

Stephen Moore, Trump’s recent choice for the Federal Reserve Board, is unbelievably unqualified. He’s also a repugnant person who makes light of AIDS, “jokes” about threatening his kids with pictures of mangled bodies, and more.

Vetting is not the strong suit of the Trump administration, but Moore is an especially bad candidate. The most recent skeletons in his closet weren’t even terribly well-hidden. Back in 2003 and 2004, Moore wrote what he clearly thought were humorous columns for National Review Online. They were anything but.

In his 2003 column, a mock family Christmas letter, he “joked” that he toilet-trained his son by putting a photograph of Hillary Clinton in the toilet, resulting in his son achieving “perfect accuracy.”

Regarding his older sons, he explained that his “ingenious child-rearing technique” for them included posting pictures of the mutilated bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons and telling them “this is what happens to kids that grow up to be Democrats.” Hilarious.

In that same letter, he also managed to throw in a gratuitous insult against French men, saying that they all need a few extra doses of testosterone. This is what passed for conservative humor in the era of “Freedom Fries.”

The 2004 version of the family Christmas letter wasn’t any better. There, he said his family was “devastated” to learn his toddler, David, had low muscle tone, saying the doctor “might as well have told us that he has AIDS.”

Another thigh-slapper: a “joke” that another of his children wrote an essay proposing to “round up all blue state liberals, sterilize them, disenfranchise them, and place them into reeducation internment camps.”

These columns are entirely in keeping with Moore’s behavior elsewhere. He also makes racist “jokes” and kisses women without their permission. He’s a tax cheat, he doesn’t pay his child support, and he subjected his ex-wife to so much psychological abuse she fled their home.

Moore has no qualifications whatsoever that justify putting him on the Fed. He’s even admitted he doesn’t understand what the job entails. All he’s got is a cruel streak a mile wide.

No wonder Trump likes him so much.

Published with permission of The American Independent.