Ex-Reagan Budget Director David Stockman does not mince words: he says George W. Bush’s policies bankrupt the country (so look for him to be attacked on talk radio and on Fox News in an attempt to discredit him). The Huffington Post:
A former adviser of Ronald Reagan has some choice words for George W. Bush.
David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director from 1981 to 1985, slammed Bush and his former boss in an op-ed in The New York Times Sunday. Stockman argued in the piece that Reagan’s view on the deficit “created a template for the Republicans’ utter abandonment of the balanced-budget policies of Calvin Coolidge.”
“(Reagan’s deficit policies) allowed George W. Bush to dive into the deep end, bankrupting the nation through two misbegotten and unfinanced wars, a giant expansion of Medicare and a tax-cutting spree for the wealthy that turned K Street lobbyists into the de facto office of national tax policy,” Stockman wrote.
Stockman, also a former Republican congressman from Michigan, resigned from Reagan’s administration in 1985 in protest over deficit spending. Bush and Reagan aren’t Stockman’s only targets in the piece; he attacks lawmakers, Federal Reserve and Treasury officials and Wall Street for a combination of easy money and deficit expanding policies that he argues will lead to another Wall Street bubble explosion in the near future.
Stockman may have a point when it comes to Bush’s policies, at least. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy will account for nearly half of the debt the U.S. will owe by 2019, according to a February analysis from the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, a left-leaning think tank.
A lot of what Stockman is saying will likely be echoed by historians, unless the history book is published by an ideological book publisher. In a sense, what he says is not big news — many know it already — but the pushback to try and defend Bush among GOPers has long been underway, whether it’s a mild or major pushback. Basically, many Republicans wish the Bush years never happened and they can pretend the economy and other issues all started on January 20, 2009.
They didn’t.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.