The man who coined the phrase "supply-side economics" is dead. Jude Wanniski served as an advisor to Ronald Reagan from 1978 to 1981, helping to shape the 40th president's tax policy that ultimately resulted in lowering top rates from 70 percent to 28 percent. Wanniski wrote editorials for the Wall Street Journal from 1972 until 1978, when an appalled Dow Jones executive caught him handing out campaign literature for supply-side convert Jeffrey Bell, who unseated Senator Clifford Case in the Republican primary but lost the general election to Bill Bradley. In addition to Reagan and Bell, other political figures influenced by Wanniski include tax-cutters Jack Kemp, Steve Forbes, and, indirectly at least, George W. Bush. It was this latter figure's foreign policy which caused Wanniski to cast his vote for the Democratic nominee in 2004. A born maverick, Wanniski controversially urged Republicans to reach out to Louis Farrakhan and claimed in The Way the World Works that 1930's Smoot-Hawley Act caused 1929's Stock Market Crash. Occassional lapses in common sense are dwarfed by Wanniski's big idea--that tax cuts give individuals greater incentive to pursue entrepreneurial projects--which became government policy, sparked the longest period of peacetime economic growth in U.S. history until that time, and gave the Republican Party the only principle that currently unites all its diverse factions. How curious, then, that Wanniski, who bequeathed this cornerstone of contemporary Republican platforms, would pass away alienated from the Grand Old Party.

We should recall that in February of 2003 Jude Wanniski wrote a Memo on the Margin entitled _Hooray, Iraq has been disarmed_. So when the GOP, most "conservatives," and much of the rest of the country was obsessing over Iraq's WMD, Wanniski had enough of the maverick in him to say it was all bunkum. He was only a handful of people who went out on a limb to make this claim. So while Wanniski might've occassionaly veered into absurdity -- supporting Farakhan, Lyndon Larouche -- he also veered into truth, while everyone else was delusional -- most still are.

It's a pity how some ideas have been distorted the futher away they get from the originator. Case in point being how in many economics classes, examples of supply side factors causing the 1970's cost-push inflation are limited to just wages. Of course, wages were a factor, but so was the price of oil at the time (a huge supply side factor actually).

Wanniski's alienation from the GOP is understandable given the fractured nature of political philosophy (and double think) these days. Of course, that doesn't make it any less sad.