No conservative worth his or her tea bags is going to accept a charge that Republicans are at fault for the current conundrumfrom anyone short of the Gipper’s “budget guru” – the man Ronald Reagan trusted as his director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Conveniently, David Stockman -- the Reagan administration’s point man in the fight for supply-side economics who proved when it came to deficit issues to be even more conservative than the 40th president – has weighed in on the matter.
What does this architect of Reaganomics say?
“Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes,” Stockman writes in a lengthy analysis of the current economic condition published Sunday in The New York Times. “This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.”
Where are Republicans really wrong right at the moment? In proposing to maintain the Bush-Cheney administration’s massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
“If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase,” writes the former conservative congressman and OMB director, who shaped the “Reagan Budgets” of the early 1980s. “More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.”
Stockman’s complete article is here.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/108026/reagans-budget-director-gop-policies-have-crippled-our-economy
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