Behind every great economic plan is the idiot who created it. I would like you to meet Mr. Benjamin Zycher.
Mr. Zycher has a long history as being an economist, having worked for many far right wing groups in the United States. Yes folks, Tim Hudak, the leader of the PC Party hired a well known Tea Party Republican to help him put together his 1 million jobs plan.
Given all the unemployment in Canada, which by the way is still higher than the United States, you would think that Hudak could have found someone in Ontario to help him come up with his dud of a jobs plan. What really bugs me, and it should bug you is what Mr. Zycher has to say on a number of other topics.
Here are just a very examples of his writings:
“The heat is on. The environmental Left is on the attack, and the target now is not ExxonMobil, or the Kochs, or the Keystone XL pipeline, or fossil fuels, or the efforts of the world’s desperately poor to escape grinding poverty, or plastics, or indoor plumbing, or those who fail to worship Gaia, or any of the other usual suspects. Instead, it is President Obama, urged last month in an open letter by 16 environmental groups to prevent the exportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and to make a commitment to keep ‘most of our nation’s fossil fuel reserves in the ground, in line with the recommendations of most of the world’s leading climate scientists’ … The letter obviously is far more a political than an analytical document, and as a reflection of scientific understanding it is deeply disingenuous. That the authors have defined their policy prescriptions as a ‘good-faith test’ for Mr. Obama is amusing in that the letter is a blatant exercise in disinformation. Thus have the environmental groups chosen to pollute the political process in pursuit of a massive suppression of technological advance and enhanced wealth for ordinary working people, an appalling exercise in bad faith. For them it is also business as usual.” American Enterprise Institute online magazine, April 8, 2014
“Now, let me be blunt: Michelle Obama, the product of lifelong affirmative-action coddling, is an intellectual lightweight who fancies herself a serious thinker. Just read her Princeton senior thesis, an intermittently coherent stream-of-consciousness pile of leftist jargon, campus pseudo-seriousness, and racial-identity babble. Can there be any doubt that the Princeton administrators accepted it only because of her skin colour?” National Review Online, Aug. 17, 2009
“I simply cannot remember an Oval Office quite so devoid of economic thinking. The latest example is the pending regulatory change, announced yesterday, which would raise the salary level above which certain classes of workers would be exempt from receiving overtime pay. Accordingly, the overtime pay requirement would be extended to vastly more workers … Suppose that the market-determined competitive salary for such workers putting in 50-60 hours per week is say, $750 per week, or $39,000 per year … Assume now that such work were to require only 40 hours per week; does President Obama actually believe that there would be no change in the competitive market salary? In other words, it is rather obvious that the market-determined salary reflects the long hours that some workers must devote to their jobs: a requirement for harder work, other factors held constant, reduces the supply of workers willing to provide it, thus raising the market salary … But until we have some ‘objective’ measure of ‘fairness’ - a mirage if ever there was one - only market competition can tell us the value of extra-hard work, in the form of prices determined by millions of individual choices made freely.”AEI blog, March 14, 2014
Mr. Zycher, president of his own research firm, has a long CV that includes his current role as resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and earlier stints at everywhere from the Milken Institute and UCLA to RAND Corp. and the U.S. State Department.
And in the wouldn’t-you-know-it category, he was senior staff economist on Ronald Reagan’s President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
What the CV doesn’t tell you – but his writings do – is that he hates government bureaucracy and positively loathes the “environmental Left.” He has thoughts on greenhouse gas, affirmative action, and working people.
As The Globe and Mail’s Adrian Morrow reports, the Ontario Conservatives chose Mr. Zycher to analyze their program in the run-up to the June 12 provincial election.
The program – the Million Jobs Plan – pledges to create that many jobs over eight years by cutting corporate taxes, killing subsidies for alternative energy, joining the trade agreement of the western provinces, slashing red tape and ending the endless traffic jams in Toronto. Oh, and it assumes that about half those jobs would have been created anyway.
“These economic benefits of the proposed reforms are substantial, and the rationales offered in defense of the status quo are dubious,” Mr. Zycher said in his 18-page study.
