Digby's Hullabaloo

Going To The Big Woodshed

by digby

David Stockman, a former top budget official in the Reagan White House, and three other people were charged Monday in an alleged securities fraud case that embroiled one of North America’s largest auto parts companies before it collapsed into bankruptcy.

Stockman, who served as budget director under President Reagan, was the former chairman and chief executive officer of Michigan-based Collins & Aikman Corp.

Federal authorities declined to comment prior to a news conference on the case.

An indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charged Stockman and three others with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, making false statements in annual and quarterly reports, making false entries in books and records, and lying to auditors as well as committing bank fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding.

It’s not all that surprising since Stockman was actually a prototype of the more modern Bushie except he shot his mouth off and gave away the game. I assumed he’d found Jesus or something since then, but I suppose that’s yet to come. They always get religion in jail.

Here’s the wikipedia entry on Stockman:

Stockman emerged as one of the most powerful and controversial OMB directors ever during a tenure that lasted until his resignation in August 1985. Committed to the doctrine of supply-side economics, Stockman took the lead in directing passage of the “Reagan Budget” (the Gramm-Latta Budget), which Stockman hoped to be a serious curtailment of the “welfare state”, gaining a reputation as a tough negotiator with House Speaker Tip O’Neil’s Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Majority Leader Howard Baker’s Republican-controlled Senate. During this period, although only in his early 30s, Stockman played a central and highly visible role as the ultimate “budget guru” in the fierce debate and contentious political wrangling over the future direction of the role of the federal government in American society.

Stockman’s power within the Reagan Administration waned after the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the famous article, The Education of David Stockman, in its December 1981 issue based on lengthy interviews Stockman gave to reporter William Greider. It led to Stockman being “taken to the woodshed by Reagan” as the White House’s PR team tried to deal with the article’s damage to Reagan’s perceived fiscal leadership skills. Stockman was quoted as referring to the Reagan Revolution’s legacy tax act as: “I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan’s 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate…. It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”

Of the budget process in his first year on the job, Mr. Stockman is quoted as saying: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”, which turned out to be the subtitle of the 1981 Atlantic Monthly article.

After his first year at OMB and on the heels of ‘being taken to the woodshed by the president’ over his candor with Atlantic’s William Greider, Stockman became disillusioned with the projected trend of increasingly large federal deficits and the rapidly expanding national debt as a result of the Reagan tax cut. In 1986, he left OMB and wrote a memoir of his experience in the Reagan Administration titled The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed that, in part, specifically criticized the failure of Congressional Republicans to support a reduction in government spending as necessary offsets to the large tax cuts that would have avoided the creation of large deficits and an exploding national debt.

Wow. That seems like it was just yesterday. In fact, it was yesterday.

I’m pretty much convinced that one of the main reasons the Republicans are failing is because their tired groundhog day bullshit is as out of date as a Flock of Seagulls mullet. Stockman was a little bit more candid than most, but he was a playah — more than 20 years ago. And here we are dealing with the fallout of the sloppy, indiscriminate, second generation of the same failed policies.

Look for the bestselling books from Republican’s jumping ship, saying that it was all due to the unwillingness to cut spending , blah, blah, blah, just like Stockman who knew very well that the “plan” was to lower taxes on the very rich so they could piss on the rest of the country (oh sorry, “trickle down” on the rest of the country.) Screwing the taxpayers is a GOP feature, not a bug. Always has been.