Reagan's Top Economist Says GOP Misled the U.S. and Tanked the Economy

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Lost in the 24/7 news cycle has been a July 31, 2010 opinion-editorial by David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. Stockman was closely tied to the development of the Reaganomics ideology, but now he points to massive failures by Republicans, while they were in power, to assure that financial accounts were balanced in government, international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the affairs of private businesses and households. Stockman excoriates modern Republicans, and particularly Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for claiming the party's current economic doctrines are rooted in traditional GOP financial philosophy. He points to a list of misguided Republican actions that have led the country to economic disaster: the runaway growth of public debt resulting "not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace ... of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts," the neocon's sky-high inflation of the military budget, the "warfare state," the removal of traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation by the financial sector which led to a "vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector," and the steady sending of jobs and production offshore. Stockman charges that Republicans have strayed so far from their ideological roots that they have "made a mockery of party ideals" and led the country into adopting policies that crippled the economy.