On Monday, right-wing economist Arthur Laffer went on Fox News and warned that if Bernie Sanders is elected president, he would cause a financial crash just like the one Barack Obama caused in 2007 — two years before he took office.
“By giving to those who have a little bit less, you provide them with an alternative source of income, other than working, and they too will produce a little bit less,” said Laffer, who is best known for his belief that tax revenues will go up the more you cut taxes for the rich, and who helped design the package of tax cuts that wrecked the state of Kansas. “Now this is math. It’s not left-wing, right-wing, Republican, Democrat, it’s not liberal or conservative. It’s just plain economics.”
“Whenever you redistribute income, you reduce total income, and that is what [Sanders is] doing, and I’m very afraid that if he were elected, we would have an enormous crash in the market,” said Laffer. “Now that crash would come in anticipation of his election, but it’s much like Obama, who I believe was the reason we had the Great Recession. As he got closer and closer to winning, the markets collapsed.”
The actual cause of the 2007 financial crisis and ensuing recession was a runaway mortgage market that bundled together bad loans to sell as high-yield investments on Wall Street. This problem started years before Obama was even conceived of as a presidential candidate. Moreover, the economy rebounded and then some once Obama’s policies were actually implemented.
Watch below: