Stockman and the Trickle

I just came across a fascinating new book by David A. Stockman, who used to be Ronald Reagan’s director of the budget. Stockman is the man many hold responsible for Reagan’s adaptation of supply-side economics (trickle down economics that held that if the rich get richer, they’ll have so much, it’ll fall down to the poor and raise everyone’s ship).

Unfortunately, Stockman had a change of heart and decided that pretty much everything he’d been behind during the Reagan years was incorrect (he eventually quit–or was fired– by the Reagan administration and went to Wall Street, where he had a mixed career) and he wanted to set a few records straight.

Stockman attempts to do this in his book, The Great Deformation, and the results aren’t pretty. Stockman’s thesis is simple, although the book at over 700 pages, is sometimes a hard slog. He proposes that the massive bailouts issued to Wall Street by an anxious 2008 Fed were nothing more than a wholly unnecessary and borderline criminal plundering of the national treasury to benefit a few hundred millionaires and billionaires at the top of some of the nation's largest banking and monetary institutions. It was not, he argues very persuasively, a plan designed to help the hundreds of millions on Main Street and to save the American economy.

Stockman is believable precisely because he is the ultimate insider and because his viewpoint are basically Republican. This is no wild-eyed leftist. And his message is scary and sobering.

It takes a bit of effort to get through all the ideas and illustrations. Stockman is an academic and he writes like one, often forgetting that "regular" people don’t have advanced degrees in economics and history. A little less technicality and a bit more plain English guidance would have been welcome. But the basic material is there and it's discernible if you want to take the trouble.

Don’t read this book if you want to keep your cool.