Posted on 10/05/2013 7:12:33 PM PDT by RKBA Democrat
I dont care if he is correct in this article. Dont trust Stockman.
I read his book, “The Great Deformation.” He may not be a choir-boy, but his book’s a masterpiece. His fearless, take-no-prisoners frontal assault on crony capitalism and the Wall Street-Washington nexus of power and money assures him a place of permanent ignominy within the establishment and their bootlicking toadies in the chattering classes. Barring the Second American Revolution, don’t look for David Stockman to be considered for anything in any future administration. By virtue of his intellectual honesty, he has been declared persona non grata by the powerful, and he should wear it like a badge of honor.
There is no doubt in my mind we are headed for a train wreck with the Republicans and Democrats responsible, the Democrats more so because they spend more money but the Republicans unwilling to turn back the big spending programs and adding a few government expansions of theAir own.
Bush 43-Medicare Part D
Nixon-EPA,OSHA
Reagan showed how to put the country on track and win elections. Both parties ended up rejecting his principles.
It is a very good rant. He has insider knowledge of what many people intuitively feel: that the System is careening out of control. Even the moochers know it in their hearts.
Bump for the morning and fresh coffee
well, the good thing is, they have pretty much sucked all the wealth out of the once great Christian middle class. so, if you’re not, for example Christian, you don’t have much to worry about anymore.
almost like it was planned this way.
David Stockman, author of The Great Deformation, summarizes the last quarter century thus: What has been growing is the wealth of the rich...See? Rich get richer, poor get poorer, just like the *rest* of the Demagogic Party sez.
Yet ensnared in the Keynesian delusion that society can create wealth by mortgaging its future, the stimulus-besotted denizens of the beltway blew it entirely on the one true domestic function of the state---even under the regime of crony capitalism that now prevails. That imperative is to maintain and adequately fund a sturdy safety net to support citizens who cannot work due to age or health, and to supplement the incomes of families whose marketplace earnings fall below a minimum standard of living.
And he still hates tax cuts and views tax cuts not as less government confiscation from people, but rather as government "showering money" on people. This idea comes from the philosophical template that all money belongs to the government and that it is up to government to assure that it is distributed fairly. At the same time Stockman (correctly) exposes the falacy that is modern "Keynesian economics" he turns around and disses Milton Friedman. (?) Then he talks about how "free market capitalism" merely needs to be smoothed out by the state.
In other words, Stockman is simply all over the place.
Stockman reminds me of a medicated version of Paul Craig Roberts
Couldn't finish his book.
Because Reagan wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer. Bush Sr. was the opposition to Reagan during the primaries, and the elites wanted to lock up the presidency so they could start filling their pockets. When Bush Sr. wasn’t doing enough to help fill the pockets of the Ivy Leaguers, Clinton got into the game.
What too many people ignore is that these elites are busy filling their pockets, regardless of which party they claim as their political home. As the recent insider campaign against Cruz shows, these people will not tolerate apostates. The real crime of Cruz in the last two weeks was being a traitor to his class - so the long knives have now come out.
Back when, Bush the Elder, etc., I don’t recall folks having a clear idea of what was going on. At this time many of us do have a fairly clear idea and hence the birth of The Tea Party. Cruz as something not seen previously, millions at his back who are through being lied to, realize how they are being ripped off, by whom, and to what order of magnitude. The thieves had counted on the folks being to dim to wake up in time. Now the Pelosis, McCains, and Reid’s have been caught with their hand in the till and their script just didn’t contain contingencies for such an impossibility.
What is flailing, by contrast, is the vast expanse of the Main Street economy where the great majority has experienced stagnant living standards, rising job insecurity, failure to accumulate any material savings, rapidly approaching old age and the certainty of a Hobbesian future where, inexorably, taxes will rise and social benefits will be cut.
ping
A very long article to tell me mostly what I already knew. I used to get into heated disagreements on FR in the pre-Obama days by saying that the economy was collapsing and actual, meaningful living standards had been dropping for many years, the much touted wealth of America was in a very few hands and our freedom was gone.
I stand ready to plead guilty to being as dumb as a rock in many ways but there are some things that seem as obvious to me as the sunrise and I cannot figure out why they are not obvious to others. I was at a little gathering yesterday where people were talking about “Obamacare” and I told the others that the most amazing thing to me about it is that so many people thought and many still seem to think that it was ever INTENDED to work out well. It is as obvious as an oncoming train a quarter mile away with whistle blowing and running a hundred miles an hour that it was never SUPPOSED to do anything but destroy the private health care system. To think otherwise seems as crazy to me as thinking that someone who proposes to chainsaw both your legs off just above the knee only wants to do that because he is convinced you will be better off that way.
As Emmitt Smith has been quoted, "a leopard can't change its stripes."
Freepers, take heed to Mr. Lowbridge...he is a wise man. Just ask the Nigerians who tried to scam him! lol
The left preaches redistribution to help the poor but that is the smokescreen, the inevitable results of their policies are to take away all hope from the poor while making the tiny group at the top ever more wealthy until final collapse. A leftist government is like a cancer that grows bigger and stronger while the body sustaining it withers away. The cancer dies after the host has died. I am amazed at the people who still don’t seem to recognize “liberalism” as the malignancy that it is. They keep proposing changes to the system like someone who has lung cancer saying that what they need is a little smaller tumor in their lung and a new tumor in their colon. They cannot seem to realize that what they need is NO tumor because they never admit that it really is a tumor. They go around calling anyone who does not want a tumor of any kind names like “nutcase”, “extremist” etc.
Stockman is correct if you are looking at only the US economy.
He uses the phrase, "notwithstanding Reagan" to include Reagan, but identifies 1989 as the date going forward.
This is the end of the cold war, the end of the bipolar world. There are dis-agreements as to whether we are a unipolar world, or a multipolar world, but definitely the US has no military or economic adversaries. We are the world hegemon.
If you do include Reagan, first there was the Caribbean Basin trade agreement(1984), the FTA with Israel(1985), and the bilateral with Canada, that Bush shifted to trilateral with Mexico, which was modified some by Clinton's parallel agreement. Then CAFTA, Chile, Columbia, Panama, Korea. The Pacific agreement is moving forward.
So you have to look at how the world economy has grown, and recognize that US monetary policy has to include world monetary policy.
Reagan's military interventionism was relatively small compared to what would come after the Soviet collapse. Obama may have shifted somewhat from military to statesmanship, but he ain't walking away from military intervention.
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