So Not Shocked

The claims by people like Art Laffer, and organizations like ALEC, that "pro business" policies produce an improving economy are not only wrong, but actually counter to the data which shows that the tax-cutting, rich fellating policies that they endorse actually make economic performance worse:

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify "business-friendly" policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making.

As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don't really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

The index measures 15 state policy "variables," such as top marginal income tax rates, property taxes, public employees per capita, state minimum wage, right-to-work law, and whether there's an estate tax. You can guess what a state has to do to rank high in all these factors and therefore shine in the index--low taxes, small government, anti-union policies, no estate tax are virtual requirements.

But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That's the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states--California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota--dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

………

Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Of course, much like Trotskyites, conservative Chicago School-type economists, and rich parasites, are impervious to the facts, so it is unlikely that this will translate into actual policy.

H/t Kevin Drum.