Word: stockman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...POLITICAL dust stirred up by David Stockman's kiss-and-tell blockbuster, The Triumph of Politics, has just about settled. A 1000 cc. does of wisdom, too little, too late, Triumph is the first weighty tome in what is sure to be a continuing series of mea culpas and finger pointing organized around the theme, "Where the Reagan Revolution went astray." Despite some of the most successful politicking ever to emerge from the Oval Office, Reagan's ambitious plans to reform America in Ayn Rand's image have stalled in a pool of red ink, victim of the pragmatic wheel...
...generation that wanted to stay forever young is entering middle age. This year the leading edge of the Baby Boom, the 76 million Americans born in the fecund years between 1946 and 1964, reaches mid-life. Former White House Wunderkind David Stockman and Actor Sylvester Stallone (Rocky, Rambo) turn 40 in 1986. So do ex-Mouseketeer Carl ("Cubby") O'Brien, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman, Real Estate Mogul Donald Trump and Comedian Gilda Radner. At the tail end of the boom, the last members of the vast litter are graduating from college this spring and stepping into...
...python," a moving bulge that distorts and distends everything around it as it rumbles through the stages of life. Locked together in a crowded race, many Boomers have learned to use their elbows. The most outspoken members retain a kind of generational arrogance epitomized by Stockman's egregious assertion in his newly published memoirs (The Triumph of Politics; Harper & Row) that the so-called Reagan Revolution was in fact not Reagan's: "It was mine...
...Stockman tells some appalling tales about the haphazard way the actual Reagan economic program of 1981 was shaped. On one occasion, he and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger casually agreed to split the difference between various military-spending proposals and came up with a figure of 7% real growth in the Pentagon budget. Stockman paid little attention to the base figure on which the Pentagon proposed to calculate that 7%. When he saw the actual numbers pointing to military spending of $1.46 trillion over the next five years, Stockman writes, he "nearly had a heart attack." Later the OMB boss...
...politicians" in both the Administration and Congress then joined in an endless series of deals and compromises that drastically watered down even the inadequate spending cuts Stockman was able to propose. Worse, they began a bidding war that turned the later tax cut into a gargantuan giveaway of federal revenues. Result: the welfare state survives in all fundamental respects, and the economy has been saddled with mammoth deficits that in Stockman's view are leading "inexorably" to doom...