Jude Wanniski

Jude Thaddeus Wanniski (June 17, 1936 – August 29, 2005) was an American journalist, conservative commentator, Nation of Islam supporter and political economist.

Wanniski was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the son of Constance, who worked at an accounting firm, and Michael Wanniski, an itinerant butcher. His father was of Polish descent and his mother was a Scottish immigrant. When he was still very young, his family moved to Brooklyn, where his father became a book binder. His grandfather was a Pennsylvania coal miner and a dedicated Communist who gave his grandson a copy of Das Kapital for his high school graduation.

After college, Wanniski worked as a reporter and columnist in Alaska. From 1961 to 1965 he worked at The Las Vegas Review-Journal as a political columnist, where he taught himself economics as he learned card counting.

In 1965, Wanniski moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a columnist for the National Observer, published by Dow Jones.

From 1972 to 1978, Wanniski was the associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. He left after being discovered at a New Jersey train station distributing leaflets supporting a Republican senatorial candidate, an act considered an ethics violation.

In 1978 Wanniski started Polyconomics, an economics forecasting firm, where he and his analysts advised corporations, investment banks and others.

He also began directly advising politicians on economic policy, first candidate Ronald Reagan and later presidential hopefuls Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes. He helped design the tax cuts made during Reagan's first term in office. His formal role as a Reagan adviser ended after an interview he gave to the Village Voice was published under the headline "The Battle for Reagan's Mind."

In the late 1990s, Wanniski developed a friendship with the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan stating "My wife Patricia and I spent the four-day July 4th weekend in Chicago at the International Islamic Conference, hosted by the Nation of Islam, in conjunction with the World Islamic Peoples Leadership. It may have been the single most important political event I have witnessed in my life. ... What made the event so important was that when the weekend began, Farrakhan was the spiritual leader of 200,000 members of the Nation of Islam and clearly the most influential of 33 million African- Americans. At its conclusion, Farrakhan stands a good chance at uniting 1.2 billion Muslims under his spiritual leadership."

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