Reagan Budget Director Crushes Today's Republican Party

[truth on hold]

Everything he says is 100% SPOT ON. Exactly what I've been saying on this board and have only got railed on by the kool-aid drinking Faux-news phony "conservatives" and government contractor leeches who populate this board.

 

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Paul Ryan’s Fairy-Tale Budget Plan

 

 

By DAVID A. STOCKMAN

 

Published: August 13, 2012

"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."

http://www.nytimes.c...-plan.html?_r=1

Edited August 16, 2012 by Joe_the_6_pack

[3rdnlng]

Does it say in there how the GOP's defense budget compares to Reagan's?

[Oxrock]

Everything he says is 100% SPOT ON. Exactly what I've been saying on this board and have only got railed on by the kool-aid drinking Faux-news phony "conservatives" and government contractor leeches who populate this board.

 

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So, you agree. Ryan's plan doesn't go far enough and isn't radical at all. That's nice. His plan apparently doesn't matter. Mitt has his own and his isn't radical either.

Edited August 16, 2012 by Oxrock

[B-Man]

Lol....you mean this David Stockman ?

 

 

 

 

How David Stockman Became Democrats' Favorite Reaganite:

 

The former OMB chief's attacks on Paul Ryan have endeared him to liberals, but they really ought to read the fine print.

August 14, 2012

 

Don't look now, but the man who ran Ronald Reagan's budgets throughout his first term is becoming a minor hero on the left. To see why, you don't need to look further than the headline of his New York Times op-ed today: "Paul Ryan's Fairy-Tale Budget Plan." But hey, let's look further anyway:

 

{snip}

 

Even if his supply-side apostasy is all but forgotten in most contemporary debates, he's won the affection of Democrats for his willingness to turn his guns on the GOP. In May, he agreed with the Obama campaign in saying that Mitt Romney's time in private-equity didn't really teach the Republican hopeful anything about how to create jobs. He has previously blasted Ryan's plan for not going far enough. And he criticized Republicans for dragging their feet on raising the debt ceiling.

 

Still, liberals might want to be wary of embracing Stockman too fully, even if he does advocate raising taxes, cutting defense spending, and attacking the Ryan plan. He also advocates jacking up interest rates and ending quantitative easing (i.e., the only form of stimulus available to the government as long as Congress is deadlocked). He has said, "I invest in anything that [Federal Reserve Chair Ben] Bernanke can't destroy, including gold, canned beans, bottled water and flashlight batteries."

 

As economist Justin Wolfers tweeted Tuesday morning, "I don't get liberals getting excited about David Stockman's anti-Ryan tirade in the NYT. His complaint is that Ryan isn't right wing enough." For Democrats, the enemy of their enemy is just that -- he's still not their friend.

 

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/how-david-stockman-became-democrats-favorite-reaganite/261121/

[GG]

Considering that the neoconservatives that Stockman derides sharpened their teeth in the Ford & Reagan administrations, Stockman should do a better job of revisionist history. You can also argue that if Coolidge & Hoover weren't so insular looking in 20s-30s, the world may have been been a bit different (for the better between 1930 & 1990).

 

My stats are better than Stockman's stats. Defense spending as % of GDP:

 

Post WWII average - 6.2%

Eisenhower Years - 11.2%

1961 - 9.4%

Ford Years - 5.4%

Reagan Years - 5.9%

Ryan's estimated - 4%

 

You were saying?

[truth on hold]

Why should it be measured against GDP? Stockman measures it against threats .... You know the things that defense is there to defend us against. And more lol using Ryan's grandiose GDP forecast. Geesh where does this board get this endless supply of dumbasses

[dayman]

Why should it be measured against GDP? Stockman measures it against threats .... You know the things that defense is there to defend us against. And more lol using Ryan's grandiose GDP forecast. Geesh where does this board get this endless supply of dumbasses

 

Try measuring against the rest of the Ryan budget. Defense spending as a percentage of all non-health entitlements per the Ryan budget. The fact that we don't have a serious threat to us militarily can't be over stated. Nobody really thinks we need to increase military spending.

[OCinBuffalo]

Oh I don't know....perhaps because liberals NEVER talk in terms of threats...and only in terms of money....

 

...until % of GDP numbers prove that we are spending less on defense over time, and not per their myths.

 

 

 

On a seprate note...given that defense spending has consistently decreased as a % of GDP.....just imagine what else must have been added...or has increased...since 1965....to the extent that we have the debt we have.

[GG]

Why should it be measured against GDP? Stockman measures it against threats .... You know the things that defense is there to defend us against. And more lol using Ryan's grandiose GDP forecast. Geesh where does this board get this endless supply of dumbasses

 

Just by asking that question puts you in the lead to carry the dumbass flag on this forum.

[John Adams]

If the best the NYTimes can do today is roll out someone who says that Ryan needs to cut deeper into things like defense (which I agree with), it's getting desperate over there.

Edited August 16, 2012 by John Adams

[IDBillzFan]

If the best the NYTimes can do today is roll out someone who says that Ryan needs to cut deeper into things like defense (which I agree with), it's getting desperate over there.

 

In fairness, the right falls for this quite a bit as well. How many times in the past year have your heard/read/seen/etc. headlines that Krugman or Beckel or Combs or Lannie Davis or Carville have "blasted" the Obama administration over health care or stimulus, only to read the story to find out that their problem was that he didn't go far enough? I think Krugman gets paid for how many times he says the stimulus was too small, and everyone else cries that Obamacare didn't include single payer.

[Jauronimo]

Why should it be measured against GDP? Stockman measures it against threats .... You know the things that defense is there to defend us against. And more lol using Ryan's grandiose GDP forecast. Geesh where does this board get this endless supply of dumbasses

Quantify threats. Show me defense spending per threat over the last 100 years on the same plot as defense spending as a percentage of GDP.

[John Adams]

In fairness, the right falls for this quite a bit as well. How many times in the past year have your heard/read/seen/etc. headlines that Krugman or Beckel or Combs or Lannie Davis or Carville have "blasted" the Obama administration over health care or stimulus, only to read the story to find out that their problem was that he didn't go far enough? I think Krugman gets paid for how many times he says the stimulus was too small, and everyone else cries that Obamacare didn't include single payer.

 

No commentator makes my blood boil as much as Krugman. When I argue with my friends, the majority of whom are leftist nuts, they love to bring up Krugman columns and tell me that I have no right to argue with a Nobel Laureate.

[meazza]

No commentator makes my blood boil as much as Krugman. When I argue with my friends, the majority of whom are leftist nuts, they love to bring up Krugman columns and tell me that I have no right to argue with a Nobel Laureate.

 

Would love to see him debate Sowell.

[DC Tom]

Why should it be measured against GDP? Stockman measures it against threats .... You know the things that defense is there to defend us against. And more lol using Ryan's grandiose GDP forecast. Geesh where does this board get this endless supply of dumbasses

 

Even for you, this is retarded. "Threats?" Seriously? Who's a threat to us today? No one. Because we spend so much on defense, you idiot.

[erynthered]

Even for you, this is retarded. "Threats?" Seriously? Who's a threat to us today? No one. Because we spend so much on defense, you idiot.

Canada is a threat, you idiot!!

 

/IeatCraonz

 

Edited August 16, 2012 by erynthered

[GG]

No commentator makes my blood boil as much as Krugman. When I argue with my friends, the majority of whom are leftist nuts, they love to bring up Krugman columns and tell me that I have no right to argue with a Nobel Laureate.

 

Tell me about it. Some Columbia Business School grads are up in arms against the current dean because of Krugman's manifestos.

 

Funny that Krugman also fired the salvo at Mankiw, and here was Mankiw a while back:

 

http://business.time.com/2008/10/14/what_greg_mankiw_really_thinks/

[truth on hold]

 

Quantify threats. Show me defense spending per threat over the last 100 years on the same plot as defense spending as a percentage of GDP.

When you're countrys going bankrupt and you're spending 3/4 quarters of a trillion on "defense" the burden of proof of is very much on the big spenders to provide a "threats" analysis. And Something a lot better than jailbird "Judy miller has the smokin gun on that Moslem dude having WMDs "

Edited August 16, 2012 by Joe_the_6_pack

[TakeYouToTasker]

Just by asking that question puts you in the lead to carry the dumbass flag on this forum.

Actually, it doesn't. Viewing things through that lense assumes that wealth, prosperity, and external threats are static; and is a lazy approach to budgeting which begins with the premise that nothing will or should come in under budget, and that the government should be in a nearly permanent state of expansion indexed to our economy.

[GG]

Actually, it doesn't. Viewing things through that lense assumes that wealth, prosperity, and external threats are static; and is a lazy approach to budgeting which begins with the premise that nothing will or should come in under budget, and that the government should be in a nearly permanent state of expansion indexed to our economy.

 

Actually it does, because there are some budget items that can be tracked back to GDP, especially if you view DoD as an integral part in how the US empire expands its reach. Percent of GDP shouldn't be the primary determinant of spending because the nature of that spend will vary depending on these perceived threats, but you always need to have a baseline to support a standing army, and control of the seas and airways.

 

Don't know how you make the leap that pegging something to GDP as a baseline automatically assumes that things will never come under budget, as % of GDP is derived after the fact. Nobody I know derives a budget from a simple percent of revenues. But spending bands of capital expenses or R&D do give a clue of whether a company is investing enough in its future. Same holds for DoD spending, as it's the capex and R&D equivalent of the private sector.

 

Few people are calling for DoD to jump over 5% of GDP. Recent history has shown that DoD spending that falls to 3% of GDP is not a sound policy because invariably things get cut that shouldn't get cut as part of the overall budget reduction process. Perhaps when we reach budget Nirvana where spending is properly funneled and there's absolutely no waste then 3% could be spent to maintain a global fighting force. But we're no where near that, and that's why you leave 1% on the table. The reason I'm not that concerned about the DoD budget is that it does support GDP and the private sector expansion, and that the spending has been stable in the 4% band for a decade, and likely won't grow much further.