A new generation of supply-side business economists has proved the most prescient on Wall Street. David Malpass, Don Luskin, Brian Wesbury, and Michael Darda now serve up the most incisive?and profitable?analyses. But far from being ?monomaniacal? or marching in lock-step, supply-siders have for the last decade engaged in spirited debate over monetary policy. The most interesting Wall Street and monetary debates these days are happening within the loose arena of supply-siders, often on Larry Kudlow?s nightly CNBC show, which entertains by far the most sophisticated economic discussions found anywhere on television.

...Unable to fight on theoretical or empirical grounds, Chait deploys vicious rhetoric to scare the GOP away from the economically and politically successful supply-side strategy. Chait has great reverence and nostalgia for those economic titans Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Bob Dole. Chait advises the GOP to remake the party in their image. But let us review: Hoover, who sparked the Great Depression with massive tariff and tax hikes, lost in 1932; Nixon, who imposed wage and price controls, endless new regulations, and set off a decade of inflation by floating the dollar, resigned in 1974; Ford, a decent man with no solution to stagflation, lost in 1976; and Dole, the Beltway compromiser who never grasped or believed in the supply-side program, lost in 1996. The big con, indeed.

In analyzing supply-side economics, Chait would have done much better writing about The Big Boom.