Open thread for night owls: Mainstream economists agree with each other. Duh

My apologies. I screwed up Monday night with the gun poll. Left out the crucial "never owned guns" category, which undoubtedly includes a big hunk of the population. A brain fart. Once published there is no way to edit polls so I was stuck with it. Therefore, I am publishing a new version tonight with a couple of new categories.

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are, respectively, an assistant professor and an associate professor in the Business and Public Policy Department at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. They write The U.S. Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham:

Watching Democrats and Republicans hash out their differences in the public arena, it's easy to get the impression that there's a deep disagreement among reasonable people about how to manage the U.S. economy.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality, there's remarkable consensus among mainstream economists, including those from the left and right, on most major macroeconomic issues. The debate in Washington about economic policy is phony. It's manufactured. And it's entirely political.

Let's start with Obama's stimulus. The standard Republican talking point is that it failed, meaning it didn't reduce unemployment. Yet in a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.

Or consider the widely despised bank bailouts. Populist politicians on both sides have taken to pounding the table against them (in many cases, only after voting for them). But while the public may not like them, there's a striking consensus that they helped:
The same survey found no economists willing to dispute the idea that the bailouts lowered unemployment. [...]

How about the oft-cited Republican claim that tax cuts will boost the economy so much that they will pay for themselves? It's an idea born as a sketch on a restaurant napkin by conservative economist Art Laffer. Perhaps when the top tax rate was 91 percent, the idea was plausible. Today, it's a fantasy. The Booth poll couldn't find a single economist who believed that cutting taxes today will lead to higher government revenue'even if we lower only the top tax rate.

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