The man who handled budget issues for President Reagan has something to say about the Romney-Ryan plan. And it’s not a compliment.
“They have a secret plan to cut the budget,” David Stockman, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, told Ed Schultz on Monday night’s The Ed Show, adding: “They won’t close any loopholes” in order to protect the highest earners.
“The top 2 percent are so damn lucky from the boom we’ve had over the past 20, 30 years,” Stockman said. “They ought to stop whining about paying a little more in taxes, because we are in trouble fiscally.”
Stockman, who in recent years has emerged as a frequent critic of the modern-day GOP, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last month in which he slammed Paul Ryan’s “fairy-tale budget plan.”
“Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse,” he wrote.
But Stockman had harsh words for President Obama, too. “After four years, President Obama hasn’t cut a dime out of defense,” Stockman told Schultz. “He should be taking on the generals, the military-industrial complex … [he should] cut back this huge defense establishment we don’t need.”
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