Reagan's Budget Director Opposes Extending Bush Tax Cuts

[spike]

David Stockman who served as President Ronald Reagan's budget director, has for years been known as a deficit hawk.

Still, he was a supply sider long before many of the current crop of Republicans who support the foundational idea that tax cuts always boost the economy were in Congress.

So it's worth noting that Stockman had a New York Times opinion piece over the weekend in which he seemed to channel liberal economist Paul Krugman in his criticism of those in the party he once served for pushing to extend the Bush tax cuts despite the impact that would have on deficits.


An excerpt:

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.

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. 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 joins former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan in opposing extending the Bush tax cuts. There appears to be a real cleft opening up in the party between old deficit hawks and the latest incarnation of supply siders, represented by actor and former senator Fred Thompson.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...stockman-opposes-extended-bush-tax-cuts-icymi

 

[jimpeel]

The current sitting head of the Fed says they should be extended.

 

[Gonz]

the unaffordable Bush tax cuts

He seems to have lost his mind. A tax cut is never, ever, an expense. It is a reduction of government thievery.

 

[spike]

It's an expense if you arbitrarily cut taxes with accounting for the reduction in revenue.

Most Americans favor letting tax cuts for the wealthiest expire.

 

[MrBishop]

He seems to have lost his mind. A tax cut is never, ever, an expense. It is a reduction of government thievery.

No Gonz...a tax-cut is not an expense..it's a deficit.

 

[catocom]

yeah raise those taxes for a month or 2....until after the election.
That's the ticket.

 

[valkyrie]

A Republican who recognizes the impact that the Bush tax cuts have on the deficit. This is a pleasant but unexpected surprise.

 

[spike]

yeah raise those taxes for a month or 2....until after the election.

Why do that? Just let the cuts expire as intended.

 

[catocom]

yeah, yeah, do That!

 

[spike]

Sounds good.

 

[catocom]

 

[valkyrie]

Meh... we could just renew the tax cuts and borrow more money from the Chinese. What could be wrong with that? [/sarcasm]

Or... we could knuckle down and straighten out this fucking deficit by pulling the government belt tight and giving up our addiction to consumerism of foreign goods and oil. Hey... there's that! Do what's right now for our future?

Or... status quo and put our heads in the sand. I'm sure it will all go away.

 

[Gonz]

Tax cuts cost nothing. Tax increases cost jobs.

 

[spike]

Tax cuts without accounting for them can cost an enormous amount. That's how the Bush tax cuts ran up a gigantic deficit.

 

[catocom]

 

[MrBishop]

He's not kidding, cato.

If you reduce the money coming in without cutting the expenses by an equal amount, you get a deficit. Bush cut taxes but didn't cut expenses. He increased expenses..and gave you that nice DEFICIT that you're living with now.

 

[catocom]

now see....
you see what you want to see.
He said nothing of cutting, just accounting, and that won't even be done.

 

[catocom]

the way I see it...just like with securing the border first before talking reform,
Do the cuts First, THEN we can talk taxes.

 

[MrBishop]

now see....
you see what you want to see.
He said nothing of cutting, just accounting, and that won't even be done.

Who? Bush?

 

[catocom]

spike