y that the tax cuts would pay for themselves so to speak. This did not happen, of course. Growth in the 80s was no greater than growth in the 70s, as the statistics in every modern textbook or records show. But the national debt nearly tripled under Reagan. Who deserved blame for this is a controversy that continues to this day. One interesting thing I found about Supply-siders is that they delight in pointing out that their theories are not wrong simply because academia rejects them. This would be falling for the "argument from authority" fallacy. They argue that science has been wrong in the past and that it is indeed wrong about this point. After all, it was once a scientific consensus that the earth was flat. They claimed that most scientific revolutions started out as minority opinions, and that this would be no different. Although these are worthy points, they are not sufficient in my opinion to make conclusive arguments against the value of scientific consensus. It seems foolish to ignore our best and brightest scholars, whose day jobs are to analyze these issues. Their excellence should be reason enough to warrant that their theories should be among the first we consider. It does not mean that they are correct, of course, but the likelihood of their being correct is more than that of the individuals who espoused the theory at the time. More often than not their information is better, and their theories more coherent, than the average person's. The following will give a summary of what Paul Krugman, a top economist, wrote in his book Peddling Prosperity. Krugman gives an excellent account of the rise of this idea. Krugman made the case that the supply-siders were what many have called "cranks," or people who stand outside the scientific mainstream and hurl accusations of basic stupidity and corruption at the entire scientific community. They do not really care if the accusations are right or not but they generally ...
