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Phil Magness Profile picture
@PhilWMagness
Aug 12, 2025 • 9 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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🧵Steve Miran is a pending nominee to the Federal Reserve Board. In addition to his fringe views on dollar devaluation, he has a long history of making basic errors about economics.
The first example comes from a bizarre speech he gave after Liberation Day back in April.

Miran declared - without any evidence - that the entire economics profession is "wrong" to oppose tariffs.

whitehouse.gov/briefings-stat…Image
Miran then proceeded to mischaracterize "trade models" by falsely claiming that they do not account for trade deficits, or assume they will self-correct.

In reality, economists since Adam Smith in 1776 have been pointing out the fallacy of Miran's thinking: Image
As for Miran's claim that modern economists assume no trade deficits or assume that they are self-correcting, it's utter nonsense. There's a huge academic literature by leading economists on the persistence of trade deficits. Miran appears to be unaware of its existence. Image
Image
In addition to the basic errors in his claims about trade economics, Miran has a long history of misusing and misrepresenting academic papers by other economists to make claims that their authors do not support.
Miran's "Mar a Lago Accord" white paper from 2024 cited a paper by Costinot & Rodiguez-Claire to support his call for a 20% baseline "optimal" tariff.

The problem? Both authors denounced Miran's proposal for misrepresenting their work.

lemonde.fr/en/opinion/art…Image
Exact same thing happened again a few months later. Miran cited a 2024 paper by Pulojas and Rossbach, claiming that it showed the US could "win" a trade war by imposing tariffs.

Except as Pujolas explained, their paper aimed to show the exact opposite.

cbc.ca/news/canada/ha…Image
Issues of competence have plagued Miran since he took his current job at the White House. In April he met with Wall Street investors to calm their concerns about Trump's tariffs.

The opposite happened & they left the meeting saying Miran was "incoherent"
fortune.com/article/trump-…Image
This is all in addition to Miran's adherence to a long list of fringe economic beliefs about trade, dollar devaluation, and even a backdoor default on the US National Debt, which the Wall Street Journal documented yesterday.

?wsj.com/opinion/who-is…

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More from @PhilWMagness

Phil Magness Profile picture
Feb 12
"The rise in anti-Semitism on the right is attributable to a handful of individuals whom Hazony is too cowardly and embarrassed to condemn. Like a vengeful alcoholic at an intervention, he is lashing out and blaming everyone but himself for the wreckage he helped create" commentary.org/articles/james…
Also note: the picture of Hazony in the banner image is from him speaking at an event cosponsored by MCC, aka Viktor Orban University.
I first encountered Hazony ca. 2018 at a dinner sponsored by ISI where he gave a talk on his book. His lecture was vapid nationalist slop that made multiple egregiously erroneous claims about American history and political philosophy.

I remember sitting there shocked that anyone could find this guy even remotely convincing - not because the message was bad (and it was) but because his arguments betrayed utter incompetence with the subject matter. I was not the only one who thought so either. Most of the others at my table were rolling their eyes at him, and whispering about his mistakes in the speech.

When Q&A opened up, I started to raise my hand to push back on some of his claims. George Gilder, who was sitting right behind me, raised his hand at the same time. They called on Gilder, and he proceeded to make some of the same criticisms of Hazony that were going around my table. Hazony's answer to the challenge amounted to meandering babble and evasion.

I didn't think much else about Hazony after that, until he resurfaced as the leader of this NatCon thing. I was not at all surprised when I read the speaker list, and saw it was an eclectic mix of bigots, cranks, and conspiracy theorists. More surprising though is that Hazony has been pushing the same bigots for the last 6+ years now, all the while feigning "shock" that they spew bigotry whenever it spills into public view...and then turning around the next day and inviting the very same bigots back to his conferences.
Read 4 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Jan 17
Another scrubbed JD Vance tweet from 2020 where he calls on the government to "make everyone wear masks."

Note that in 2022 Vance reinvented himself as a mask opponent for his senate campaign. Image
Another one from May 2020: Image
Vance in March 2020: even if masks don't work, we should wear them anyway as a reminder to avoid touching our faces. Image
Read 6 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Jan 13
Earlier today, President Trump made a last ditch attempt to salvage his tariffs before the Supreme Court by claiming that it would be impossible to refund them.

There's a problem. Trump's own DOJ has been admitting in court filings for months that refunds are possible.🧵
Here's the Trump DOJ's initial response on April 29, 2025, admitting that if they lost an unappealable decision, the government would refund the illegal tariffs with interest.

libertyjusticecenter.org/wp-content/upl…Image
Image
On May 28, 2025 the Trump DOJ filed a motion for a stay of the US Court of International Trade's ruling against them, arguing that the tariffs could be refunded with interest.

The court granted their stay based on this promise.

libertyjusticecenter.org/wp-content/upl…Image
Read 6 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Nov 4, 2025
10 things to listen for in tomorrow's SCOTUS hearing on tariffs:

1. Will the DOJ try to argue that tariffs are not taxes, but regulatory "surcharges" under the international commerce clause out of the hope that this gives them more leeway under delegation of congressional power?
2. Will Roberts accept a "tariffs are not taxes, they're regulations" argument from Trump in light of his (in)famous Obamacare tax argument from Sebelius?
3. Will Kagan clarify her position on when the nondelegation doctrine applies by suggesting that tariffs fit that constitutional test, whereas other cases where she rejected it did not?
Read 10 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Oct 22, 2025
In 2016 the @AAUP launched a campaign urging colleges to ban conservative students from recording professors in the classroom.

I FOIA'd emails of Hank Reichman, their VP at the time & author of the policy. It revealed he was working with a Marxist group to secretly record free-market economics faculty at a conference he disliked.

The AAUP has always been a coven of left wing partisan hacks and hypocrites.
@AAUP For those who asked, here is the policy recommendation adopted by Reichman's committee.

aaup.org/sites/default/…Image
@AAUP There are several FOIA'd emails, but here I'll share some of the main documents. Here is the Marxist student group coordinating behind the scenes with Reichman to promote their recordings of economics professors at the conference. Image
Read 5 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Oct 8, 2025
A bibliometric tour of Carl Schmitt, attesting that his alleged "importance" is a very recent phenomenon of only the last ~30 years. 🧵

First we start with English Ngram, which shows Schmitt had a negligible amount of citations until the 1990s. Image
What about other language groups though? Here's French, where Schmitt had a slightly earlier rise no-thanks to Derrida and a few other postmodernist oddballs started engaging with him. But also, a very recent phenomenon that's almost entirely in the 1990s-2000s...and then drops. Image
Spanish is interesting because it has a slow, steady uptake - albeit at very modest citation levels - in the 1930s-70s. But it too only really spikes in the 1990s-200s, and then declines a bit like French. Image
Read 9 tweets

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