One thing that the nuttier elements of the GOP can be safely relied upon to do is to re-write history to fit their particular agendas and biases. Be it bogus arguments that the Bible defines marriage between one man and one woman - in a previous post, we saw that the true biblical model is polygamy - or rewriting history as recent as three decades ago concerning Ronald Reagan. Reagan had many faults - not the least of which was his refusal to address HIV/AIDS early on in the crisis - and would have likely admitted to many of them. Under the faux version of history now being flung about by Tea Party nutcases and disingenuous Republicans, one would think that Reagan was a demi-god and that his economic policy justify the current smoke and mirrors approach to the federal deficit. On of the architects of Reaganomics was David Stockman and he doesn't have many kind words for those who are peddling the GOP's latest fiscal snake oil. Here are highlights from a column at Mother Jones:*
David Stockman, Reagan's first budget director in the 1980s and the godfather of the Gipper's supply-side tax cuts, was watching the proceedings [of new GOP members of Congress being sworn in] from his home in Colorado and shaking his head. Republicans like Price were, in Stockman's view, misreading history—even perverting the Reagan message. As he saw it, they were guiding the nation toward financial ruin by pushing for tax cuts without having the guts to seriously slash spending—and dishonestly justifying their "flimflam" by citing his work.
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Beyond goosing caviar sales, Stockman says, the Republicans are not sincere about boosting the economy. (He also chastises Democrats, but his most trenchant criticism slams the GOP.) He contends that the party of Reagan has spent the last three decades compounding the errors that he had a hand in engineering in the early 1980s—and a reckoning looms.
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"The honest-to-goodness fact," Stockman says, "is that in February 1981, there wasn't close to a Republican majority for tax cuts without any accompanying or coupled spending cuts. The idea of supply-side in its purest form"—that tax cuts fuel economic growth that yields increased tax revenues—"was only embraced by a handful of junior Republicans, plus Jack Kemp."
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The Reagan administration hardly minded proposing massive cuts to both taxes and spending. But then things went haywire, Stockman notes. The tax cut ballooned from $500 billion over five years to $1 trillion after lobbyists added special-interest tax breaks for various industries. And on the spending side, the Reagan administration went hog-wild throwing money at the Pentagon. The inevitable happened: The deficit ballooned.
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"I was horrified," Stockman recalls. In 1982, 1983, and 1984, Reagan signed a series of tax hikes (PDF) that, according to Stockman, recovered 40 percent of the original 1981 tax cut.
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For GOPers to argue, as they do nowadays, that only permanent tax cuts spark economic activity is "totally inconsistent with what we used to argue in the 1980s," Stockman notes.
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[H]e [Stickman] has a simple three-part prescription: First, cut military spending by $100 to $150 billion a year.
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His second point is classic deficit-hawkery: Apply a means test to Medicare and Social Security.
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His third: "Massively raise taxes." His favorite device: a Tobin tax, named after Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin, which would be levied on financial transactions.
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Stockman counters that Republicans' taxes bad/tax cuts good mantra is disingenuous. "I don't think those kinds of propositions are appropriate, and you could call them a lie if you really wanted to use rhetoric," he says. "They can't say government is too big if they're saying hands off defense. It's not responsible to say government is the problem when you've embraced 95 percent of the dollars.
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"It's very dismaying," he adds, "to see that 30-year descent into the kind of nihilism, know-nothingism that is represented by the Republican Party today." It's not the Gipper's GOP anymore.
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