After the fortunate demise of President Trump’s nomination of Republican hustler Stephen Moore for a position on the Federal Reserve, Paul Krugman remarked “Aside from Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, not one prominent Republican economist stepped up to oppose Moore.”1 And indeed “Greg”, as I guess his friends like to call him, gave the news of Steve’s nomination the cold shoulder in his blog: “Steve is a perfectly amiable guy, but he does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job. If you doubt it, read his latest book Trumponomics (or my review of it).”
As it turned out, ole’ Steve wasn’t so “amiable” after all. Last month, Dan Mangan and Brian Schwartz, writing for CNBC, filled us in on some seriously gory details:
Court records from Stephen Moore’s divorce paint President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Federal Reserve Board as a brazen philanderer who openly talked about his mistress in front of his kids — and then continued shorting his ex-wife on tens of thousands of dollars of alimony and child support even after a judge held him in contempt of court.
“I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you,” Moore said to the couple’s children in front of his wife Allison “at their son’s graduation ceremony,” court records claim.
Other court records show Moore, who is a distinguished visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has a $75,000 IRS tax lien against him for unpaid taxes on his 2014 filing. The lien relates to a deduction he took for both alimony and child support to his ex-wife. He has said he is contesting that amount.
Naturally, Moore, when he wasn’t cheating on his wife, like you know who, could be found spouting the standard right-wing line about how “the left” was destroying marriage and the family and, you know, western civilization, all the while sporting, and spouting, views on women that would get him kicked out of Hooters in two shakes of a lamb's tail.
But that’s not the worst. Remarkably, Moore’s views on race, which are straight out of the Old South, received remarkably little publicity. Fortunately, Jim Tankersley of the New York Times did the necessary tube work and filled us in on Moore’s unreconstructed views. In a television interview back in 2017, Moore claimed that “Robert E. Lee hated slavery. He abhorred slavery, but he fought for his section of the country. That’s a totally different subject,” adding “The Civil War was about the South having its own rights.”
Well, among those “rights”, of course, were the “rights” to own and oppress slaves and steal their children and sell them as slaves for profit. When Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania on the way to Gettysburg, he captured free black American citizens and enslaved them, sending back to the South to work as slaves to maintain slavery. Confederate soldiers under Lee’s command murdered captured black Union soldiers in violation of all the rules of war. Moore is a sexist, a racist, and an apologist for all that was worst in America, as well as being an utter fraud as an “economist”. If he gained a hundred pounds and dyed his hair (badly), he could be Donald Trump’s double.
1. A bit of an exaggeration, unless you don’t consider Michael Strain, economic big-wig at the American Enterprise Institute, a “prominent Republican economist”. Strain gave a thumb’s down to Moore here
