"Taxi Driver" Ec

The Friday before last, in Vancouver, Columbia economics professor Robert Mundell announced to delegates at an annual meeting of the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) Institute that "Taxi Driver," Martin Scorsese's nightmarish 1976 masterpiece, is "the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP." The film -- which starred Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a mentally unstable cabbie, and Jodie Foster as Iris, a child prostitute unwilling to be rescued by Bickle -- was "indirectly responsible," the Nobel Prize-winning economist claimed, "for adding between $5 trillion and $15 trillion of output to the US economy."

Now, "Taxi Driver" was a popular movie, but it wasn't exactly "Star Wars." So what did Mundell mean? Turns out he was referring to the fact that John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, later claimed that he was inspired by "Taxi Driver" (in which De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician), and that his action was an attempt to impress Jodie Foster.

According to Mundell, we learn from a conference report in the Financial Times, "the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts." The era of prosperity that followed, said Mundell, who apparently subscribes to Reagan's "trickle-down" economic policy, was indirectly made possible by Hinckley.

Remember when George H.W. Bush, while running for president in 1980, derided Reagan's proposals as "voodoo economics"? If Bickle and Hinckley were somehow involved, perhaps a better term would be "cuckoo economics."

Via Footnoted.