Too bad Reagan didn’t listen in ’81

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, speaks out amidst the clangor of the fiscal and monetary policy debate in Washington. Ever a deficit hawk, these days he starts to sound reasonable:

In attacking the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers, the president is only incidentally addressing the deficit. The larger purpose is to assure the vast bulk of Americans left behind that they will be spared higher taxes — even though entitlements make a tax increase unavoidable. Mr. Obama is thus playing the class-war card more aggressively than any Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt….

On the other side, Representative [Paul D.] Ryan fails to recognize that we are not in an era of old-time enterprise capitalism in which the gospel of low tax rates and incentives to create wealth might have had relevance. A quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, offshored economy on Main Street requires practical and equitable ways to pay its bills.

His op ed piece relies a bit too much on the the thesaurus (the spirit of William Safire is about). But the message that we will all have to give up something to get along is spot on.

It is obvious that the nation’s desperate fiscal condition requires higher taxes on the middle class, not just the richest 2 percent.