Meet Ben Zycher, Tea Party Tim Hudak’s “Independent” Economist

From the Campaign Office of the Ontario Liberal Party

(A Brief Foreword Comment from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper – A number of months back I read a column in The Globe and Mail or one of the other mainstream newspapers that dubbed Ontario Conservative leader TimHudak – notice I left the word ‘Progressive’ out of the Conservative title – Tea Party Tim.

Tea Party Tim Hudak. Raise a cup of tea to seeing services, from those for seniors, to young children, and many in between being gutted like a trout.

So to those who might find some sugar candy in Hudak’s simplistic promises to gut 100,000 public services jobs, slash corporate taxes in a province that already has among the lowest coporate taxes in the developed world, and cut Ontario’s deficit at the same time, heed what some of your parents said all those years ago. Be careful who you may take candy from.)

Toronto, Ontario, May 13, 2014 – Tim Hudak released his Paycheques-To-Pink-Slips Plan that was signed off by, and based on calculations from American “independent” economist Ben Zycher.

Zycher is a “resident scholar” at Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, funded by Tea Party billionaires the Koch Brothers.  (LINK)

Zycher on Michelle Obama’s intelligence:

“Now, let me be blunt: Michelle Obama, the product of lifelong affirmative-action coddling, is an intellectual lightweight who fancies herself a serious thinker. Just read her Princeton senior thesis, an intermittently coherent stream-of-consciousness pile of leftist jargon, campus pseudo-seriousness, and racial-identity babble. Can there be any doubt that the Princeton administrators accepted it only because of her skin color?”

(Ben Zycher, The National Review, August 17, 2009, LINK)

Zycher on “point[ing] out that most modern-day terrorist acts are perpetrated by Muslims”

“And so I have a question for my legal-beagle colleagues: Are whites not entitled to equivalent treatment under the 14th Amendment? If so, does that mean that education about the history of slavery would become illegal, as it would depict whites negatively? Would it be illegal to point out that most modern-day terrorist acts are perpetrated by Muslims? Anything about black crime, illegal immigration by Hispanics, ad infinitum? Can air brushing of photos be far behind?”

(Ben Zycher, April 24, 2006, LINK)

Zycher is a 9/11 denier:

“Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, agrees that neither Bin Laden nor the Taliban had the expertise for an operation that required sleeper agents to be placed in various American communities years in advance, pilots trained to fly not crop dusters but 757s, a detailed knowledge of U.S. flight operations and co-ordination of targets within tight time limits. He blames Iraq, saying only “a modern state intelligence service with substantial resources, bureaucratic, expert and financial, with the requisite political will and internal controls necessary to prevent infiltration, moles, leaks and other sources of compromise” could have pulled it off.”

(A different kind of enemy; New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal; September 21, 2001)

Zycher is a climate change denier:

“Confronted with more data that contradict climate change orthodoxy, climate change alarmists still advocate a carbon tax, but with new rationales.”

 (Ben Zycher, American Enterprise Institute, December 3, 2013, LINK)

“Conservatives like Ben Zycher at the American Enterprise Institute is unmoved by the panel’s findings. “Temperatures have been warming in fits and starts since the end of the little ice age, and no one really knows the extent to which that long term trend is caused by man.”

(Ben Zycher, The Daily Beast, LINK)

Niagara At Large encourages you to read columns written by Ben Zycher on climate change, renewable energy, the proposed XL Keystone pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to the southern United States, and a host of other issues by visiting http://www.aei.org/scholar/benjamin-zycher/ .

(NOW IT IS YOUR TURN. Niagara At Large encourages you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)