Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Too late, Stockman
Reagan-era adviser David Stockman writes a complete and concise summary of how we got into our current mess.
Sounds like a Populist, with one important and thought-provoking exception. Stockman sees a basic principle of balancing all accounts as the traditional Republican agenda, and sees the loss of this old agenda as the deep source of the failure. I'm not convinced that balance was ever an explicit Republican point, but it would be a good basis for a fresh approach!
Fine, Dave, but where were you while all this was happening? Why didn't you speak out and use your influential name to slow it down? ¶ 7:03 AM
Sounds like a Populist, with one important and thought-provoking exception. Stockman sees a basic principle of balancing all accounts as the traditional Republican agenda, and sees the loss of this old agenda as the deep source of the failure. I'm not convinced that balance was ever an explicit Republican point, but it would be a good basis for a fresh approach!
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.
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. 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.
Fine, Dave, but where were you while all this was happening? Why didn't you speak out and use your influential name to slow it down? ¶ 7:03 AM
