Sure, lots of people say that. But not all of them were Ronald Reagan’s budget director:
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — “How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy.” Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse.”
Get it? Not “destroying.” The GOP has already “destroyed” the U.S. economy, setting up an “American Apocalypse.”
Stockman rushes into the ring swinging like a boxer: “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 … will soon reach $18 trillion.” It screams “out for austerity and sacrifice.” But instead, the GOP insists “that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.”
Stockman says “the second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40% of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970.” Who’s to blame? Not big-spending Dems, says Stockman, but “from the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”
Finally, thanks to Republican policies that let us “live beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore,” while at home “high-value jobs in goods production … trade, transportation, information technology and the professions shrunk by 12% to 68 million from 77 million.”
As the apocalypse draws near, Stockman sees a class-rebellion, a new revolution, a war against greed and the wealthy. Soon. The trigger will be the growing gap between economic classes: No wonder “that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1% of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90% — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12%. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.”
Get it? The decaying fruit of the GOP’s bad economic policies is destroying our economy.
>‘GOP Destroyed U.S. Economy’
>Sure, lots of people say that. But not all of them were Ronald Reagan’s budget director
I would like to add a little more context to Mr. Stockman’s comments (lifted from his Wikipedia entry).
He was CEO of Collins & Aikman Corp., a auto parts manufacturer employing 15,000 people, when it went backrupt. He lost an estimated $13 million himself, and the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) indicted him for fraud, misreporting C&A’s earnings. Ultimately, the charges were dropped, but, just like Conrad Black and G. Gordon Liddy, one really should cite conservatives’ criminal, not just their political, bona fides.
I’d say Stockman is partially right. Skewing all rewards to go to the wealthy, even if they were not the productive portion of the wealthy, is bad policy. But I think a good part of the blame has to be that we never, never, never got off the perpetual war machine. If you allege that you are trying to maintain some semblance of a representative democracy, and the biggest institutions in the country are the military and corporations-as-persons, neither of which support democratic institutions in any way, some day the wheels are going to fall off.
As I recall, Stockman was the on of the first arguing for this voodoo economics. Now that his brainchild has come home to roost is certainly a day late and a few trillion dollars short. REPUBLICANS DESTROYED AMERICA should be emblazoned on every billboard and TV in the nation.