"Supply-side economics" is an extremely common term in the media as Google searches demonstrate. But searches of the academic literature yield very few hits and most of these hits are not describing any sort of academic school of thought. Supply-side economics is a political philosophy with economic implications, not a part of economics and that is why it rarely even merits a mention in economics textbooks. THE central idea of the supply-side political philosophy is that lower taxes are good for the economy. It is that simple. Wikipedia also says that supply siders like lower regulation, and this is often part of supply side rhetoric, but that is a secondary issue and Wikipedia gives no examples of any regulations that supply siders oppose. Supply siders generally support regulations that increase the rights of property holders and oppose things like minimum wage laws and environmental laws, but these are not as important to supply siders as low taxes and ideas about regulations are less universally agreed upon in this movement.
The "supply-side economics" movement is closely associated with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial page which has long promoted the concept. A WSJ journalist, Jude Wanniski, is often credited with coining the term in 1975 around the time when he clearly coined the term, "Laffer Curve", which is perhaps the most important tenant of supply side economics.
Read Wikipedia for more explanation of supply-side economics. It is pretty good, but I disagree with a few points, such as the characterization that "supply side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought". It is as much a school of macroeconomics as Marxism is or as creationism is a school of biology. None of these "schools" have much mainstream influence in academia even though they are common in the media and all have had a lot of political influence at different times and places.
No comments:
Post a Comment