A Republican for Higher Taxes
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
NYT
David Stockman has never been one to shy away from a roaring economic-policy debate. The former boy-wonder budget director in the first Reagan administration and the architect of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies, Stockman has been very busy lately rejecting the tax-cutting recommendations of Republicans in Washington and arguing that we must get our fiscal house in order or watch our way of life continue its decline. As an “imperialist power,” he says, America is in danger of being at “sundown.” Stockman, who turned 64 on Wednesday, has always been ahead of the curve on tax and fiscal issues, and it appears that he is ahead of it again this time, too.
Starting with a much-discussed Op-Ed article in The Times last summer, and then more recently on “60 Minutes,” “This Week” and “Parker Spitzer,” Stockman has been calling for Congress to take serious and immediate steps to start closing the $1.25 trillion fiscal 2011 budget deficit through a series of unconventional actions, beginning with allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, as they are scheduled to at the end of the year. One of his more cogent arguments has been that since about half of us don’t pay income taxes anyway, letting taxes rise on the other half would be “progressive” (in tax parlance, this means it would hit hardest those with greater means to pay).
Stockman has also been talking about cutting military spending, cutting farm subsidies, cutting health-care spending, cutting Medicare payments and Social Security payments for the wealthiest Americans and for whom their financial impact is minimal — despite being rightly owed the money — in order to bring the deficits down and to show the world we are again serious about grappling with our proclivity toward fiscal mismanagement. “If you think you can continue this fiction indefinitely by borrowing money to hand to people so they can keep spending and that nothing will go wrong in the global currency market, the global fixed-income market, the monetary system, break-out commodity inflation — all the possible bad things that can happen — if you want to ignore all that, then spend a couple more years borrowing money and paying it back to taxpayers, because that’s essentially what your [sic] doing,” he told me on Wednesday. “These are deficit-financed tax cuts.”
(More here.)
NYT
David Stockman has never been one to shy away from a roaring economic-policy debate. The former boy-wonder budget director in the first Reagan administration and the architect of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies, Stockman has been very busy lately rejecting the tax-cutting recommendations of Republicans in Washington and arguing that we must get our fiscal house in order or watch our way of life continue its decline. As an “imperialist power,” he says, America is in danger of being at “sundown.” Stockman, who turned 64 on Wednesday, has always been ahead of the curve on tax and fiscal issues, and it appears that he is ahead of it again this time, too.
Starting with a much-discussed Op-Ed article in The Times last summer, and then more recently on “60 Minutes,” “This Week” and “Parker Spitzer,” Stockman has been calling for Congress to take serious and immediate steps to start closing the $1.25 trillion fiscal 2011 budget deficit through a series of unconventional actions, beginning with allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, as they are scheduled to at the end of the year. One of his more cogent arguments has been that since about half of us don’t pay income taxes anyway, letting taxes rise on the other half would be “progressive” (in tax parlance, this means it would hit hardest those with greater means to pay).
Stockman has also been talking about cutting military spending, cutting farm subsidies, cutting health-care spending, cutting Medicare payments and Social Security payments for the wealthiest Americans and for whom their financial impact is minimal — despite being rightly owed the money — in order to bring the deficits down and to show the world we are again serious about grappling with our proclivity toward fiscal mismanagement. “If you think you can continue this fiction indefinitely by borrowing money to hand to people so they can keep spending and that nothing will go wrong in the global currency market, the global fixed-income market, the monetary system, break-out commodity inflation — all the possible bad things that can happen — if you want to ignore all that, then spend a couple more years borrowing money and paying it back to taxpayers, because that’s essentially what your [sic] doing,” he told me on Wednesday. “These are deficit-financed tax cuts.”
(More here.)
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