You just cannot trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Here are two more reasons why:
1) Kevin Drum on the first column by the frequently deceptive pundit/activist Stephen Moore, who just joined the paper's editorial board:
Moore's sermon today is about the wonders of supply side economics:
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan chopped the highest personal income tax rate from the confiscatory 70% rate that he inherited when he entered office to 28% when he left office and the resulting economic burst caused federal tax receipts to almost precisely double: from $517 billion to $1,032 billion.
Tax revenue doubled! That does sound like a triumph for the tax cut jihadists, doesn't it? But this is Stephen Moore, after all, so perhaps we should take a more careful look:
First, we should adjust for inflation, shouldn't we? In 1980 dollars, $1,032 billion is actually $670 billion.
And of course, population increased over that time too, which naturally increases tax payments. Adjusting for that, tax revenue was $2,283 per person in 1980 and $2,694 per person in 1990.
That's not double. It's an increase of 18%. And it's worth noting that a lot of that is due to consistent tax increases throughout the 1980s (details here). Without that, Reagan wouldn't have gotten even the anemic growth in tax revenue that he did.
But wait. Is "anemic growth" fair? Why yes. After all, we can play this game with any decade. Annual tax receipts are here. Adjusting for inflation and population growth, the supposedly horrible 70s produced an increase in tax revenue per person of 25%. The Clinton 90s produced growth of 40%. In fact, Reagan produced the slowest growth in tax revenue of any decade since World War II. That's a real supply side triumph.
2) Media Matters on the Journal using a 15-year-old graph in a global warming editorial:
The Journal claimed that "the case for linking fossil fuels to global warming has, if anything, become even more doubtful" in recent years. As evidence, the Journal presented a graph from the First Assessment Report of the IPCC, released in 1990 (not available online), which shows that global temperatures were higher 700 years ago than they are today...
The IPCC's Third Assessment Report, however, refutes this claim. The report features a graph similar to the one the Journal touted, but the more recent graph shows that since 1900, fluctuating surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have spiked well beyond pre-industrial levels. The report credited increased amounts of data and technological advancements for its findings: "Since the SAR [Second Assessment Report, 1996], a number of studies based on considerably expanded databases of palaeoclimate information have allowed more decisive conclusions about the spatial and temporal patterns of climate change in past centuries."
What a mess.
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