On Tuesday, November 9th, Stephen Moore, gave a presentation on the country’s current economic standings, particularly in light of the recent elections, in front of a crowded student audience in Edmunds Hall. Moore, the senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal, is the third speaker in the series of spokesmen made available by the BB+T grant awarded to PC to fund its capitalism program.
As a reformed Republican, Moore was all smiles about the recent elections, hopeful that our economy will start seeing the turn around it needs. With our federal budget skyrocketing at unheard of numbers, our nation is overdue for a change. Moore, who used several statistics and graphs to prove his point, advocates a flat tax rate to return our country to normalcy. Currently, the top one percent of the population pays 95 percent the taxes, allowing the bottom 50 percent to pay much less than their proportional share. Citing the Bridge to Nowhere, proposed by the Republican Party in 2005 to connect a scarcely populated island in Alaska to the mainland, Moore, like many other Americans, realizes that federal spending has become atrocious. Along with many other policies he would like to see employed, he believes that tax rates must be cut in the short run to result in revenue in the long run. Moore has worked under several previous presidents and, after seeing economic downturns even worse than the one that plagues our country now, is confident that with new management we will soon come out of the present slump.
Moore joined the Wall Street Journal on May 31, 2005, as a member of the editorial board and senior economics writer, although he contributed to the Journal for years before he was added as a staff member. He graduated from the University of Illinois and then earned his master’s degree in economics from George Mason University. Until 2004, he founded and became president of the Club for Growth, which raises money for political candidates who favor free-market economic policies. From there, he became president of the Free Enterprise Fund. In previous years, he served as senior economist on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, as a budget expert for the Heritage Foundation, and as a senior economics fellow at the Cato Institute. At the Cato Institute, he published dozens of studies on federal and state tax and budget policy. In 1987, he served as a consultant to the National Economic Commission and research director for President Reagan’s Commission of Privatization. Moore also frequently appears on talk radio and multiple television networks, most notably FOX, to discuss economic policy and related impact.
Among many other achievements, Moore has published five books, including The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy – If We Let It Happen, It’s Getting Better All the Time: The 100 Greatest Trends of the Last Century, and most recently, Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger.