Reagan’s budget chief Stockman denounces Paul Ryan budget as ‘fairy-tale’

By Glenn Wright

David A. Stockman, director of Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, and once a proponent of the “trickle-down” economics idea, today ripped into the debt-reduction ideas of House Budget Committee Chair, and Mitt Romney‘s new VP selection, Paul Ryan, as a “fairy-tale”.

Writing in the New York Times, Stockman provided a dire-sounding critique of the Ryan plan, and the behavior of Republicans in general, as he explained the real problem was not only the welfare state favored by liberals, but also the warfare state favored by Republicans.

Speaking of Ryan’s budget, Stockman accuses Ryan of talking tough on budget cutting, but being a hypocrite in action, because, as Stockman says:

“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…the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.”

Further, Stockman criticized Wall Street megabanks, that he called “quasi-wards of the state”, because they had received huge government bailouts as banks that are “too big to fail”, Stockman said that instead the institutions, which he described as dangerously unregulated and unmanageable, were “too big to exist”. Stockman recommended going back the Depression-era Glass-Steagall legislation, which “separated commercial and investment banking”.

Finally, Stockman dismissed the idea that either Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan had any idea of how to create jobs:

“Like his new boss [i.e., Romney], Mr. Ryan has no serious plan to create jobs….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.”

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