From The Nation: Reagan's Budget Director: GOP Policies 'Have Crippled Our Economy'

[rasputin1952]

Pretty hefty stuff, but when Reagan's own Budget Director comes out and calls GOP ideas on the economy basically nuts, it's worth the read.

<snip>

No Republican, certainly no conservative Republican, is going to accept evidence from President Obama, Democratic congressional leaders, liberal journals of opinion, mainstream economists or non-partisan budget analysts that says the policies of Republican presidents and congresses – and the Democrats that go along with them—are most responsible for the economic troubles the United States is facing. The very notion is dismissed as quickly as the scientific evidence of evolution and climate change.

<snip>

"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 <1>. "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."

<snip>

"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."


http://www.thenation.com/blog/108027/reagans-budget-director-gop-policies-have-crippled-our-economy

The full version link, printed in the NYT's is in the piece above, here is the link for Stockman's article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html?_r=2

[izquierdista]

1. Too little, too late

Can he spend the rest of his life sitting at the dunk tank?

[zipplewrath]

2. Ah, the golden asterisk

This from the inventor of the Golden Asterisk.

Read his book. He's kinda constantly trying to apologize, without admitting his own culpability.