If This Guy Wants a Shutdown, It Must Be Dumb

How do you know that shutting down the government is an absolutely terrible idea? Because David Stockman is for it, reasons Dee Dee Myers in Vanity Fair. “Bring it on!” declared Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s one-time budget guru, in a Daily Beast interview. “If the Republicans hold the line, Obama will fold faster than a lawn chair.” Stockman, for the uninitiated, led Reagan’s war on the “welfare state” and once confessed that the president's tax cuts were a “Trojan Horse” to bring down rates on the rich.

It’s “kind of hard to sell trickle down,” he said. Now, three decades later, trickle down’s been thoroughly discredited—even George HW Bush called it “voodoo economics”—but Republicans have stuck with it, leading us to these massive deficits, “all in the name of a crackpot ideology,” Myers writes. “So when David Stockman speaks, don’t walk, Republicans, run—as fast as you can, in the opposite direction.” (More David Stockman stories.)