Toro
Diamond Member
He was talking to posterity, economic students, history students, policy students...I used Stockman's book as a major part of my Master's lit review. If hindsight is 20/20 vision, shouldn't the improved clarity of vision apply, where applicable, to foresight, especially where yesterdays tired and failed old arguments continue to be applied to the problems of the present?
Sure.
But he knew the type of economics that Reagan was presiding over was complete lunacy while it was happening. So did Poppa Bush..although when he became President, he actually implemented fixes.
It's kinda like an interview I saw with L. Paul Bremer who said that the Iraqi policy was a total tanglefuck. Well..that information would have been more useful while it was happening.
Okay, but if you read his book, he explains that he tried to impose order, and part of the reason he didn't continue in Reagan's second term was because they wouldn't listen to him / they weren't consistent.
David Stockman was President Reagan's OMB Head from 1981-1984, and the economist who planned Reagan’s economic policy. Stockman described his plan as a radical economic revolution that would cause short-term pain for some, but produce long-term benefits for all. The revolution failed because political reality got in the way, and because the men he worked with were not policy men or economists, but politicians with constituencies and project preferences of their own. Stockman is an economic and ideological purist. He seems to see numbers as being more tangible than people are, but he is intellectually consistent. He listed a host of corporate welfare giveaways with the same tone of outrage that he treated social welfare.
Stockman’s view corresponded with Hamby’s, but he added that because society wants a welfare state, and because cutting funding for those programs are not democratically feasible, we must pay for it with taxes. The economic mess that began in 1981 occurred because President Reagan refused to raise taxes. The Urban Institute Report confirms this. The Economic Recovery Tax Act was responsible for long-term deficits, and a cumulative revenue loss of $300 billion by the end of 1984 and $1 trillion by the end of 1987.
Those are two parts I have on Stockman, but what I remember of his book, he really tried to explain that 2 minus 5 does not equal 20. There was no way to continually raise the defense budget and reduce taxes (revenue, people, that's what taxes are, the stuff that pays for all our untouchable expenses).
I forgot to address the main question, I'm sorry. People working within any administration do NOT publicly criticize while they are working within that administration. They just don't. I don't know that its any less disloyal after, but it is definitely less hazardous to one's present employment.
For the ideological wonks, Stockman was a hardcore free-marketer whose philosophy is often aligned with the Austrian School of Economics. I have a lot of respect for him because he wasn't promoting an intellectual fraud like many of the supply-siders were/are.