David Stockman Is Outraged — And A Lot Of Powerful People Won't Like What's In His New Book

Stockman is part of Reagan/Bush's team and always will be.

wiki-
David Alan Stockman (born November 10, 1946) is a former U.S. politician and businessman, serving as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan (1977–1981) and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985).

Stockman became one of the most controversial OMB directors ever during a tenure that lasted until his resignation during August 1985. Committed to the doctrine of supply-side economics, he assisted the approval of the "Reagan Budget" (the Gramm-Latta Budget), which Stockman hoped to be a serious curtailment of the "welfare state", gaining a reputation as a tough negotiator with House Speaker Tip O'Neill's Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Majority Leader Howard Baker's Republican-controlled Senate. During this period, although only in his early 30s, Stockman became well known to the public during the contentious political wrangling concerning the role of the federal government in American society.

Stockman's influence within the Reagan Administration decreased after the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the famous 18,246 word article, "The Education of David Stockman",[6] in its December 1981 issue, based on lengthy interviews Stockman gave to reporter William Greider. The White House's public relations team thereafter attempted to limit the article's damage to Reagan's perceived fiscal-leadership skills. Stockman was quoted as referring to Reagan's tax act as: "I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan's 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.... It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down.' So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[7] Of the budget process during his first year on the job, Mr. Stockman is quoted as saying: "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," which was used as the subtitle of the article.

After Stockman's first year at OMB and after "being taken to the woodshed by the president" due to his candor with Atlantic Monthly's William Greider, Stockman became inspired with the projected trend of increasingly large federal deficits and the rapidly expanding national debt. On 1 August 1985, he resigned OMB and later wrote a memoir of his experience in the Reagan Administration titled The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (ISBN 0060155604), in which he specifically criticized the failure of congressional Republicans to endorse a reduction of government spending as necessary offsets to the large tax decreases, in order to avoid the creation of large deficits and an increasing national debt.

He's a little too left-leaning for us to pay attention to.

Got it.

Balanced budgets, a shrunken federal govt and the replacement of income taxes with consumption taxes aren't exactly left wing.

Paul Krugman's take is here (direct link: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/cranky-old-men/ ) . Then again, his opinion of Krugman is "New Deal revivalists Like Paul Krugman are essentially telling fibs and peddling historical legends is not offensive merely because it distorts the distant past. These legends actually compound the deformations of the present by rationalizing policies that cannot succeed and will only bury the nation deeper in debt."

Considering Stockman's past of being large-scale wrong on Reaganomics, especially when it counted (i.e., before it became entrenched in Washington groupthink), I think a legless millipede has more to stand on before throwing around that accusation.

I note that he doesn't explain what exactly he is referring to when he talks about Krugman's "fibs" and "historical legends." He just tosses those words around. It's meaningless blather...

...and New Deal revivalists, I don't think it's too hard to figure out: he's one of the old(er)-school Republican conservatives, the kind who never got tired of grinding their axes against FDR and Keynes due to their self-image as fiscally responsible, and wound up being useful idiots for the combo of "starve the beast" ideologues and "deregulation & tax cuts uber alles" plutocrats.

Now that the ideological wing of the Republicans has gone full teabag, Stockman is hoping for a revival of his POV, despite the drastically different economic landscape now compared to 1980.

He seems to lurch around an awful lot. I think he is basically confused, as well.

OR, he just doesn't have all that much to do with his time...

criticize Regan tax policy. Here is a link to the Atlantic Monthly article that pissed Reagan off so badly in 81.

"None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."
—David Stockman
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-education-of-david-stockman/305760/

for the Reagan liars and Stockman is still just trying to cash in on whatever he thinks will sell today. Stockman conspired against 99% of Americans while in power and expects people to just forget about it? It's a typical repuke tactic to feign concern of issues, such as Rand Paul pretending to care about drones, when they don't give a flying F when they actually get power.

Stockman is a fraud.