Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore, also known as Steve Moore, founded the Club for Growth and has served on the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Moore advised Herman Cain's 2012 presidential campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. He has been criticized for getting paid to promote policies for the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.

President Trump announced Moore's nomination to Federal Reserve Board in March 2019.

News and Controversies

Qualifications for Nomination to the Federal Reserve

President Trump announced Moore's nomination to Federal Reserve Board in March 2019. In response to his nomination, Moore said “I’m kind of new to this game, frankly, so I’m going to be on a steep learning curve myself about how the Fed operates, how the Federal Reserve makes its decisions. He continued "It’s hard for me to say even what my role will be there, assuming I get confirmed.” Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, said that Moore "does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job.”

"Grading the States" Scrutinizes Rich States, Poor States and Other Rankings

Since 200, Moore has worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) on "Rich States, Poor States: ALEC-Laffer Economic State Competitiveness Index." Moore co-authors the report with Jonathan Williams -- ALEC Chief Economist and Vice President for the Center for State Fiscal Reform -- and Dr. Arthur B. Laffer.

Critical analysis of Rich States, Poor States and other "business rankings" can be found at GradingTheStates.org. Grading the States is a project of the Iowa Policy Project, overseen by economist Peter Fisher, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa.

"Across the years, we have continued to find profound problems in the way these business climate rankings are constructed," Fisher said.

"The measures that underlie the rankings often align with the ideology of the organization promoting the ranking, rather than research showing what may be important predictors of state economic success. The various measures, sometimes numbering over 100, are cobbled together into an index number that has no real meaning. As a result, we see wide disparity in the way various states are ranked. Most states can find a high ranking to brag about, and an alternative low one they can use to argue for drastic changes in state policy."

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council

According to American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) website, Moore serves on the "Private Enterprise Advisory Council." Although he is not listed on the "ALEC Board of Scholars" webpage, an ALEC press states Moore "serves on the ALEC board of scholars."

“In 25 years of knowing Stephen Moore, he’s been a stalwart supporter of free-market solutions. I know he will defend individuals – and the 50 states – against bad economic policy,” said Lisa B. Nelson, Chief Executive Officer of the American Legislative Exchange Council. “He will advance on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors the same principles he advances as a board member for the American Legislative Exchange Council: limited government, free markets and federalism.”

On August 4th, 2011, he spoke at a Shell Oil-sponsored plenary session of the 38th Annual ALEC Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, along with fellow ALEC "scholar" Arthur B. Laffer. Moore also participated in the 2011 ALEC Annual Meeting, speaking on a "Corporate Taxes and International Competitiveness Panel" in front of the Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force.

About ALEC

ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our PRWatch.org site.

Club for Growth and Free Enterprise Fund

Moore played a lead role in the creation of the Club for Growth. In January 2005, Moore and "some prominent" Club for Growth "members including Arthur B. Laffer, a board member, along with Mallory Factor, a businessman" started a similar group, the Free Enterprise Fund.

In May 2005, Moore wrote a letter to Club for Growth members in which he said: "'To see the club splintered this way was a heart-breaking tragedy, but the good news is most of the original founding committee members of the old Club for Growth that we built into such a political juggernaut helped me launch the Free Enterprise Fund," he continued. He said he was leaving to join the Wall Street Journal's editorial board and turning the new group over to Mr. Factor, adding that there remained "a crying need" for an organization to hold Republican officials' "feet to the fire."

Affiliations

• Cato Institute, Senior Fellow
• Free Market Project at the Media Research Center, Member of the Board of Advisers
• Institute for Policy Innovation, Senior Research Fellow for the IPI Center for Economic Growth
• National Review, Contributing Editor
• Virginia Institute for Public Policy, Member of the Board of Governors
• Director, Donors Capital Fund
• American Legislative Exchange Council, Board of Scholars
• Searle Freedom Trust Grant Advisor

Formerly:

• Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, adjunct scholar
• Cato Institute, Director of Fiscal Policy Studies
• Club for Growth, President & CEO
• Advisor to Dick Armey (R-TX), Senior Economist on the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress
• Heritage Foundation, Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs
• Hoover Institution, visiting scholar
• Consultant to the National Economic Commission in 1987
• Research Director for President Ronald Reagan's Commission on Privatization

Critics

• "A voodoo economist ... [who uses] especially devious methods to torture the data," says The New Republic's Jonathan Chait.
• "His career has been marked by a pattern of errors, deception and falsehood," Brendan Nyhan and Ben Fritz.
• "Moore has zero credibility," concludes economist Brad DeLong.

SourceWatch Resources

External Articles

Books and Essays by Moore

Stephen Moore is the author, co-author and editor of several books and numerous essays including:

• Stephen Moore, "Bummer of a Recovery," Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2011
• Bryan Leonard, Stephen Moore, Jonathan Williams, Rich States, Poor States 2011, American Legislative Exchange Council report, June 23, 2011
• Stephen Moore, "A 62% Top Tax Rate?," Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2011
• Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, "Boeing and the Union Berlin Wall," Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2011
• Stephen Moore, "Mediscare Redux," Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2011
• Stephen Moore, "Progressive Indexing Merits 'Serious Consideration,'" Washington Post, July 7, 2005
• Stephen Moore, Stephen Silvinski, "Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors: 2004," Policy Analysis no. 537, Cato Institute publication, March 1, 2005
• Stephen Moore, "Spending, Not Tax Cuts, Has Sent Deficit Spiraling," Chicago-Sun Times, February 8, 2005
• Stephen Moore, Phil Kerpen, "Show Me the Money! Dividend Payouts after the Bush Tax Cut," Briefing Papers no. 88, Cato Institute publication, October 12, 2004
• Stephen Moore, "Issue Ads: Let 'Em Rip," Washington Post, September 20, 2004
• Stephen Moore, "The Right Economic Agenda," Cato Institute website, September 2, 2004
• Stephen Moore, "Contract Revisited," Cato Institute website, June 23, 2004
• Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway, Stephen Moore, "The Immigration Problem: Then and Now", The Independent Institute, winter 2000, [1]
• Stephen Moore, Julian L. Simon, "It's Getting Better All the Time : 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years ", Cato Institute, October 1, 2000, ISBN 1882577973
• Sanford J. Ungar, Julian L. Simon, Stephen Moore, "The Economic Consequences of Immigration", University of Michigan Press, September, 1999, ISBN 0472110500
• Stephen Moore, "Welfare for the Well-Off: How Business Subsidies Fleece Taxpayers", Hoover Institute, May 1999 [2]
• Stephen Moore, "Immigration and the Rise and Decline of American Cities", Hoover Institute, June 1, 1997, ISBN 0817958622
• Stephen Moore, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, "Restoring the Dream: The Bold New Plan by House Republicans", Random House, May 1995, ISBN 0812926668
• Stephen Moore, "Government: America's No. 1 Growth Industry : How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Impoverishing America", Institute for Policy Innovation, January 1995, ISBN 0964612704
• Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway, Stephen Moore, "Immigration and Unemployment: New Evidence", Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, March 1994 [3] [4] [5]
• Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Stephen Moore, "Still an Open Door? U.S. Immigration Policy and the American Economy", American University Press, August 2, 1994, ISBN 1879383322
• Stephen Moore, "How Economists View the Impact of Immigrants," Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, 1990 [6]
• Stephen Moore, "Slashing the deficit, fiscal year 1990: A blueprint for a balanced budget by 1993", Heritage Foundation, 1989, ISBN 0891950486
• Stephen Moore, "Privatization: A Strategy for Taming the Deficit Economy", The Heritage Foundation, 1988

General Articles

• "Moore Passes Torch to Toomey. Former PA Congressman to Lead Preeminent Pro-Economic Growth Advocacy Group," Club for Growth, January 6, 2005.
• Peter Roff, That's Politics! column, UPI (Washington Times), January 6, 2005: Economist Stephen Moore, "president of the politically influential Club for Growth ... is moving on to start a new group, The Free Enterprise Fund, a grass-roots organization that will build support for the Bush White House initiatives to kill the so-called death tax, reform Social Security through the creation of private accounts, repeal the capital-gains tax and enact commonsense legal reforms to curtail outrageous lawsuit judgments that impose millions in costs to the U.S. economy each year."
• David D. Kirkpatrick, "Leadership Dispute Causes a Split in a Powerhouse of Fund-Raising for Conservative Causes," New York Times, July 8, 2005.