Many Republicans have long hailed the budgetary prowess of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, isn’t one of them.
Once a leading champion of supply-side economics who took the lead on economic policy in the Reagan White House, Stockman suggested that Ryan is not a serious figure in the fiscal debate.
“He’s all hat and no cattle,” Stockman told The Atlantic in an interview published online Tuesday. “Beyond that, I think he’s intellectually dishonest. His budget plans are bogus.”
Stockman said in the interview that he would give Reagan a “somewhat negative” rating “for being so stubborn and insistent” on the build-up of defense. He said that the GOP’s memory of the Reagan presidency is too rosy.
“Because Republicans claim that we had this great Golden Age in the 1980s, that there was a boom in the 1990s, and that everything was going well during the George W. Bush era until some mysterious comet came in from deep space and caused a meltdown in 2008,” Stockman said. “My argument is that this was mostly a phony prosperity built on massive additions to public and private debt.”
Read the entire interview here.
