Stockman Joins March Away From GOP Plans

by Stuart Shapiro

It’s been a big weekend for established Republicans to march away from the insanity that has become the core of the GOP platforms.  First David Frum and now David Stockman, budget director for Ronald Reagan, decried both the Obama and Ryan budget plans as unrealistic.  Stockman saved his harshest words for Ryan:

Ingratiating himself with the neo-cons, Mr. Ryan has put the $700 billion defense and security budget off limits; and caving to pusillanimous Republican politicians, he also exempts $17 trillion of Social Security and Medicare spending over the next decade. What is left, then, is $7 trillion in baseline spending for Medicaid and the social safety net — to which Mr. Ryan applies a meat cleaver, reducing outlays by $1.5 trillion, or 20 percent.

Trapped between the religion of low taxes and the reality of huge deficits, the Ryan plan appears to be an attack on the poor in order to coddle the rich. To the Democrats’ invitation to class war, the Republicans have seemingly sent an R.S.V.P.

I would have loved to see a mea culpa for the Reagan Administration role in creating what Stockman calls, “rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, offshored economy on Main Street,” but this will do nicely.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.