Karl W. Smith, Columnist

Arthur Laffer Deserves Some Kind of Award

The central goal of supply-side economics was to reduce inflation with minimal damage to the economy, and it worked.

June 4, 2019 at 12:00 PM UTC

Karl W. Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Previously, he was vice president for federal policy at the Tax Foundation and assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina.

Both an economist and an entrepreneur.
Photographer: SAUL LOEB/AFP

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President Donald Trump’s decision to award Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom has met with no shortage of criticism, some of it deserved. More than anything else, Laffer was a policy entrepreneur, and his promotion of his ideas was at times reckless.

At the same time, that boldness was crucial in the development of what came to be known as the “Supply Side Revolution,” which even today is grossly underappreciated. In the 1980s, the U.S. economy avoided the malaise that afflicted Japan and much of Western Europe. The primary reason was supply-side economics.