Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Reagan’s Former Budget Chief, David Stockman, Rips Paul Ryan

Stockman blows Ryan apart in today's NYT:
PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.”...

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade....

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

5 comments:

  1. Oh, 'scuse me, didn't realize Herbert Hoover the fascist interventionist do-gooder was a "true conservative" now?

    And Eisenhower? The father of the CIA-led coup d'etat.

    Come on now, Stockman, you'll have to do better than that.

    Whose leash has this mad barking dog torn off of?

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    1. I would refer you to this book: "Freedom Betrayed:Herbert Hoover's Secret History of World War II and It's Aftermath" to learn more about Hoover's attitude regarding foreign policy and war.

      Hoover favored the U.S. entry into WWI, later, after seeing the consequences of U.S. involvement in European power politics he became a strict non-interventionist and leader of the isolationist movement in the U.S. prior to WWII.

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  2. Evidence is usually required when one claims another is devoid of credibility, particluarly regarding math. While i concur that a defense hawk is not truly conservative, the playing field is no longer like 1961 or 1981 for that matter. The toothpaste is already out of the tube with regard to the imperialist lot we've chosen. Anyone who would scale it back must do so carefully and Ryan does not seem like a guy who would be rash or impulsive--not that he's gonna be the decision maker, as he's only VP if he wins.

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  3. wow..... hopefully someone reads this and wakes the hell up

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  4. Wow!!! Stockman nailed it and Ryan to the wall.

    I called a conservative radio show host on yesterday and voiced my displeasure with the Ryan pick and his so-called plan. The way I see, and I told the host this, is that Ryan's plan, while better than Obama's (that's not saying much) is simply nowhere near good enough. What the country needs are actual cuts not a slowing of the rate of growth and a balanced budget in 2040, maybe.

    Ron Paul's plan cut 1 trillion dollars in spending during year one with significant cuts to the military and a balanced budget in 3 years, not 28 years like Ryan's plan.

    Romney and Ryan, and Obama and Biden for that matter, are empty suits who don't deserve to occupy the highest offices in the land. As a matter of fact, they don't even deserve to run an out-house.

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