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BREAKING NEWS | |
REAGAN’S BUDGET DIRECTOR:
America is insolvent, tax cuts are not the answer, both parties are
blowing smoke
November 01, 2010
(NATIONAL) -- It might sound like heresy but David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director - who once preached tax cuts and who was the architect of the biggest tax cut in history - is now in favor of putting a one-time surtax on the rich. And that’s not all, not by a long shot.
He says taxing the rich doesn’t scratch the surface of the type of revenue America needs to generate – not to mention painful spending cuts - to crawl out of the mess it is in.
And he says those in his own Republican party who are preaching tax cuts as an answer to the country’s ills are not being straight with the American people.
“It is rank demagoguery,” says Stockman. “The Republican Party, and it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves.”
Stockman, in a wide ranging interview, told CBS news in a “Sixty Minutes” segment that ran this past weekend that America is insolvent and increasing that insolvency at $100 Billion a month.
We are “out of the imperialism business” said Stockman and we can no longer be the policeman of the word, adding that America has to get out of the two foreign wars it is waging at the earliest possible time regardless of the consequences.
In an interview with CBS reporter Leslie Stahl, Stockman also criticized President Obama and Democrats for advocating tax cuts for the middle class because now, said Stockman, we have both political parties “telling the big lie (because) we’ve had a thirty year spree of phony prosperity in this country.”
Stockman also says politicians have deliberately created the perfect boogeyman in the word taxes.
“We’ve demonized taxes, we’ve created almost the idea that they are a metaphysical evil,” says Stockman. But he thinks a one time surcharge on the very wealthiest Americans would cut the national debt in half because they are the ones who have benefited the most, and disproportionately so, over the past thirty years.
“In 1985 the top 5% of households, the wealthiest 5% had a net worth of eight trillion dollars…today after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top 5% have a net worth of $40 Trillion. The top 5% have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.”
And as far as cutting spending as the answer to America’s sluggish economy and no-jobs recovery from a brutal recession that continues to take its toll, Stockman says neither party is willing to make the painful cuts that are necessary in either defense spending, social security, Medicare, farm subsidies and things like education loans for middle class students to get America off life supports.
He predicts both parties will come back after the mid tern elections and do what they have done in the past: nothing.
Below is a link to a portion of Stockman’s interview with CBS’s Leslie Stahl.
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