Republican Slash and Burn on Romney-Ryan Fairy Tales

The rather infamous David A Stockman who fed the country the fairy-tale soup of supply-side economics under President Reagan, and then turned apostate of sorts has penned a scathing column on the leaders of what once was, and I presume still is, his party.

While there is plenty to cheer about his attacks, his actual ideas for setting things right need to be taken with a double-margarita’s dose of salt.

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.

[this is an especially juicy ad-hominem] “the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago.”

The greatest regulatory problem — far more urgent that the environmental marginalia Mitt Romney has fumed about — is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money. Forget about “too big to fail.” These banks are too big to exist — too big to manage internally and to regulate externally.

Heck, go have a good time….

but put the happy-horns away…

 “…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. [The Atlantic]