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“Dow 36,000” guy says Santorum’s tax plan doesn’t add up

- January 15, 2012

This is an interesting clash of worldviews that I wouldn’t have expected. I am not competent to evaluate the arguments made here, it’s just interesting to consider the political alignments. Perhaps a rough analogy is Paul Krugman’s disagreements with Obama in the 2008 primaries. If Santorum does somehow win the Republican nomination, I assume Hassett would support him as being preferable to than the alternatives (just as Krugman felt about Obama).

P.S. I’m not saying Hassett = Krugman. Krugman never wrote a book called Dow 36,000 (and, given that Hassett talks about his back of the envelope calculations, I think his ill-fated Dow prediction is relevant to any evaluation of his expertise here). I’m just thinking about the differences between intra-party and inter-party disagreements.

P.P.S. I just came across this which I wrote last year and is still relevant, I think:

Assurances of the soundness of the market did not stop even after the 2008 market crash. In 2010 two Yale professors published a book recommending that young adults from affluent families go into debt to buy stocks and then hold them for many years to prepare for retirement. James Glassman and Kevin Hassett’s 1999 book, Dow 36,000, has been discredited since the early 2000s, but that hasn’t stopped Glassman, who is currently hosting a regular show on PBS, or Hassett, a columnist for Bloomberg News. Americans have been getting false messages of security from all directions, and the senders of these messages remain active participants in our public discourse. Retirement riches from compound interest are as much of an unfunded obligation as any government program.