Stephen Moore is a supply-side economist who served as an economic advisor to Donald Trump. He was a guest on The Bob Zadek Show in October 2018, discussing the economic program he helped design, and he was a central topic of a March 2019 episode in which economist David Henderson evaluated Moore’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board.
Background and the Club for Growth
Bob Zadek introduced Moore as one of Donald Trump’s chief economic advisors and described him as a free marketeer. Moore founded the Club for Growth and served as its president from 1999 to 2004. He was a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and had worked closely with the Heritage Foundation. He was a commentator on Fox News and, at the time of the interview, the chief economic commentator on CNN. He co-wrote the book Trumponomics with Arthur Laffer, scheduled for release at the end of October. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Moore had also helped form the Committee to Unleash American Prosperity together with Arthur Laffer, Larry Kudlow, and Steve Forbes. Zadek asked him about the group, and Moore described its purpose as educating Republicans to ensure that presidential candidates in 2016 ran on what he characterized as a pro-economic growth supply-side agenda of lower taxes and less regulation. He said the group ultimately met Trump and teamed up with him, and that Larry Kudlow had become Trump’s chief economist. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Trumponomics
In the October 2018 interview, Zadek asked Moore to explain the program that had, in Zadek’s telling, made economic life in America better so quickly. Moore said the program consisted of deregulation and lower taxes and of getting government off the back of business, and that he had told Trump the program was working even better than when he, Larry Kudlow, and others had drawn it up for him a couple of years earlier. Moore said he had not expected it to happen so profoundly and so rapidly; he cited 4% growth and the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. He also pointed to a Wall Street Journal story showing that the biggest wage and income gains in the last 18 months had come from adults without a high school education. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Moore attributed the results to the replacement of what he called a community organizer who knew nothing about business with a pro-business businessman. He recounted the story of a man who runs an auto mechanics store, who told him business was like a light switch flicked from off to on the day after Donald Trump was elected president. Moore said he had heard similar accounts from business owners around the country, from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. He described Trump as not an ideological person in the way Ronald Reagan was a conservative, but as a common-sense guy who understood the ideas, and said Trump was not a hard sell on them. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Moore also addressed what he called the cost of the Obama administration’s policies. He said that instead of a recovery, the country was left with $10 trillion of debt, and that future generations would be paying for those mistakes for the next 100 years. Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018)
Nomination to the Federal Reserve
In March 2019, Charlie Deist guest-hosted an episode about Moore’s nomination by Trump to the Federal Reserve Board. Deist described Moore as a supply-side economist, meaning he thinks that tax cuts tend to pay for themselves. He noted that Trump had consulted Moore on key economic proposals, including free trade, and that Moore had pushed Trump to remove tariffs. Deist said it looked from the outside as though the nomination was politically motivated, because Moore had recently written a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling the Fed and its recent interest-rate hikes a threat to growth. He said Moore had also chimed in that Jerome Powell should perhaps step down, and that the fear was the independence of the central bank could be at stake. David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019)
Deist’s guest was David Henderson, professor emeritus at the Naval Postgraduate School and a research fellow with the Hoover Institution. Henderson said he and Moore were friendly but not friends, and that he nevertheless thought Moore should not be appointed to the Fed. His stated reason was that Moore does not know enough about monetary policy. He said he would prefer someone sharply critical of the Fed who nonetheless really knows Fed policy. Henderson argued the Fed is snobby about such matters, recounting that the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank had told him a talk he gave on a panel would be recorded and posted online and then made an exception the year he gave it, which he attributed to a slide questioning why a government not good at determining the right amount of steel in the economy should be trusted with the amount of money in it. David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019)
Henderson characterized Moore as a very nice guy but careless in a lot of his writing. He said the position Moore would be good at was Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, where he would push for capital gains tax cuts; Henderson noted that Moore had laid out in an article in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics how reducing the capital gains tax rate somewhat would probably yield the government more revenue. But Henderson concluded Moore would not be good at monetary policy and that putting him on the Fed would be a wasted slot. David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019)
Trade
A September 2019 episode on trade featured Don Boudreau and did not include Moore as a guest. Zadek listed Stephen Moore among those, alongside Donald Trump and his advisor Navarro, who complained that China had been treating the United States unfairly from a trade standpoint, a concept Zadek called absurd. Boudreau’s answer was that trade does not take place between countries but is carried out by flesh-and-blood individuals, and that international trade is no different from national trade. This is the only appearance of Moore’s name in the excerpts from that episode. Trump’s War on Trade (2019)
Across episodes: Moore’s role in economic policy
The two 2018 and 2019 episodes present Moore in different postures rather than in argument with one another. In October 2018, Moore speaks as an architect and defender of the Trump economic program, describing deregulation, tax cuts, and rapid growth; in March 2019, Henderson and Deist discuss him as a nominee to the Federal Reserve, weighing his monetary-policy knowledge and the effect his appointment might have on the central bank’s independence. The question of the Laffer curve and whether tax cuts pay for themselves figures in the background of both, but the later episode shifts from the program’s design to the suitability of one of its designers for a different office. The 2019 trade episode touches Moore only in passing.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of Moore’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board, nor any position he held after the 2019 episode. They do not give the contents of his Wall Street Journal op-ed beyond Deist’s summary, nor the details of the capital gains article Henderson cites. They do not name the trade agreement Moore discussed with Trump in the Rose Garden beyond the excerpt’s reference to Canada, and they do not state what became of the Committee to Unleash American Prosperity.
Episodes
1 appearance, 2018–2018.
- Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018) — Principles and Successes of Trumponomics. Economic Advisor to Donald Trump