A staunch Republican---on Republican fiscal irresponsibility

David Stockman, for those of you who may not know, has always been a staunch, life-long Republican, having been elected to political office (the US House of Representatives) but most famously was the Director of the Office of Management and Budget for Ronald Reagan's administration, serving there until 1985. He was famously for "supply-side economics" and had a bit of an illustrious career, for a few different reasons (you can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stockman). This past Sunday, The New York Times ran a column from him, chiding the Republicans for saying they want to lower our debt but simultaneously trying to keep the "Bush tax cuts" which benefit the wealthiest of the nation. It is an article I think all voting, thinking Americans should read. Following are but the first two paragraphs of the article (for the rest of the column, see the link at bottom): Four Deformations of the Apocalypse How my GOP destroyed the U.S. Economy IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase. More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes. Link to original post: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html