FormerDittoHead

This week, Paul Ferrell writes in Marketwatch about former Reagan insider David Stockman’s recent editorial in the NY Times about how Republicans have all but destroyed the US Economy.

In the midst of a debate as to whether or not to continue the Bush tax cuts, which have disproportionately benefited the upper class.

We’ve arrived at a historic turning point as a nation that no longer needs outside enemies to destroy us, we are committing suicide. Democracy. Capitalism. The American dream. All dying. Why? Because of the economic decisions of the GOP the past 40 years…

But Stockman doesn’t pull any punches in his editorial.

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.
…
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.

And he should know, because it was Stockman who took the lead in directing passage of the “Reagan Budget” the first year of his Presidency.

Later that year, Stockman drew fire for his candid remarks admitting that, like most Republican policies, Reagan’s 1981 tax cut was passed as a lie (he called it a Trojan Horse) to justify giving tax breaks to those already benefiting most from our economy.

“It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down,’” he explained, “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.” (link)

But his current editorial goes even further than his prior admissions of Republicans selling benefits to all but delivering them only to the wealthy.

He reviews the history of the failed Republican economy hypothesis of expecting tax cuts to the wealthy resulting in growing the economy.  He also doles out a healthy amount of criticism to those on the academic and political fringe who are calling for a restoration of the gold standard which, he writes, helped create the Great Depression.

That all brings him back to the present and points out how those Republicans arguing for extending the Bush tax cuts not only haven’t learned from the history of the last century, but from the last decade, and that to make a universally known failed policy the cornerstone of their platform, shows how ideologically bankrupt the Republicans are.