Justin Fox, Columnist

Applying the 'Dow 36,000' Discount to Trump's Tax Cuts

Exaggeration rides again for an administration in need of a victory.

October 18, 2017 at 7:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Take it down a notch, Kevin Hassett.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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Yes, it seems a little unfair to keep bringing up "Dow 36,000" at this point. The infamous book, co-authored in 1999 by Kevin Hassett, who took over last month as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was wrong. So what! I've written lots of wrong things in the past, and I appreciate you not mentioning them in the comments every time I publish a column.

Still, I do try to learn from my mistakes. And reading through the CEA's report this week on "Corporate Tax Reform and Wages: Theory and Evidence," I could not shake the sense that Hassett might be doing the same thing he did 18 years ago. The basic approach is this: