hem would significantly boost productivity, thereby outgrowing any deficits caused by the tax cuts. Again, this prediction proved false. Figure 1. Another supply-side economist was Paul Craig Roberts, a Congressional staffer for former quarterback-turned-Congressman Jack Kemp. Another was Martin Anderson, who was so stung and bitter by academia's refusal to hire supply-side economists, he would go on to write a bitter tirade against academia in a book entitled Impostors in the Temple. The supply-siders have one card in their deck that they can claim to be proud of, Nobel laureate, Robert Mundell. They even go so far as to claim that he is the father of supply-side theory. Although Mundell has never discouraged this impression, there is little evidence that it is true. Indeed, he is purported to hold some beliefs, for example, on the causes of the Great Depression, that go against the very fundamentals of supply-side theory.So where did the supply-side ideas actually come from? From Laffer and Bartley, developed over a series of dinner conversations at Michael 1, a famous restaurant near Wall Street. It was there, scribbling on napkins, that Wanniski showed Bartley the magical effects of tax cuts. Krugman writes: "There it was that [Bartley] and Laffer discovered that Keynesian economics was logically inconsistent - an insight that had eluded [Nobel laureate] Paul Samuelson and a few thousand other people over the course of hundreds of academic conferences. They also discovered that Milton Friedman was wrong in believing that monetary policy could have important effects on the economy - an insight that had similarly eluded [Nobel laureates] Friedman, Lucas and the faculty of the University of Chicago over a generation of notoriously brutal conferences. And the results of these deep thoughts over dinner were for the most part published -- surprise -- on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, or in Kristol's Public Interest....
