On Tuesday, a former senior policy analyst in the Reagan administration and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department in the Bush 41 White House essentially stated that Adolf Hitler was a better person than President Trump.
Bartlett even doubled down:
Bartlett has made his contempt for President Trump quite plain before;
As well as his contempt for religious people:
Bartlett has a high opinion of himself; he wrote in The Washington Post in September 2017 that he helped “create the tax myth” that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. He wrote:
Four decades ago, while working for Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), I had a hand in creating the Republican tax myth. Of course, it didn’t seem like a myth at that time — taxes were rising rapidly because of inflation and bracket creep, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the economy seemed trapped in stagflation with no way out. Tax cuts, at that time, were an appropriate remedy for the economy’s ills. By the time Ronald Reagan was president, Republican tax gospel went something like this:
The tax system has an enormously powerful effect on economic growth and employment. High taxes and tax rates were largely responsible for stagflation in the 1970s. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, which was based a bill, co-sponsored by Kemp and Sen. William Roth (R-Del.), that I helped design, unleashed the American economy and led to an abundance of growth.
Bartlett continued, “Based on this logic, tax cuts became the GOP’s go-to solution for nearly every economic problem. Extravagant claims are made for any proposed tax cut. Wednesday, President Trump argued that “our country and our economy cannot take off” without the kind of tax reform he proposes. Last week, Republican economist Arthur Laffer said, ‘If you cut that [corporate] tax rate to 15 percent, it will pay for itself many times over. … This will bring in probably $1.5 trillion net by itself.’ That’s wishful thinking. So is most Republican rhetoric around tax cutting. In reality, there’s no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth.”
Bartlett’s predictions were way off; on December 20, 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was designed to cut taxes on individuals and businesses, stimulate the economy, and create jobs.
And guess what? Real gross domestic product (GDP), which increased 2.2% in the first quarter of 2018, leaped to increase at an annual rate of 4.1% in the second quarter of 2018, the highest growth since the third quarter of 2014 and the third highest rate of growth since 2011.
Bartlett may soon have to retract another prediction; in November 2017 he posited this:
I think many Democrats and independent political observers are puzzled by the intensity with which Republicans are pursuing their tax cut. It’s not politically popular and may well lead to the party’s defeat in next year’s congressional elections. So why do it? The answer is that Republicans are pushing the tax cut at breakneck speed precisely because they know they are probably going to lose next year and in 2020 as well.