David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, on cutting taxes - video, audio & transcript

[Bozita]

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june10/makingsense_02-05.html

PAUL SOLMAN: Almost everyone I talk to says too big to fail is a bad idea, and, yet, in Republican and Democrat administrations alike, it has been the de facto policy. Why?

DAVID STOCKMAN: I think part of the problem is that Wall Street has this tremendous army of lobbyists, who strangle in the cradle any decent idea before it can even see -- see the light of day.

PAUL SOLMAN: Which sounded a lot like Stockman's political polar opposite, Paul Krugman.

PAUL KRUGMAN, columnist, The New York Times: This is as raw an incidence of the power of money in preventing us from doing something that everybody knows we should do that I have ever seen.

PAUL SOLMAN: And now both men favor a new tax on risk-taking financial institutions, which prompted one last question for Ronald Reagan's budget director, famous for the starve-the-beast argument, that tax cuts would force government to cut spending.

Do you still feel that way?

DAVID STOCKMAN: I think the lesson of the last 25 years is that it doesn't work. You can keep cutting taxes until you reach the point where this year -- or the year just ended, we spent $3.6 trillion, and we only collected $2.2 trillion.

So, we are now so far out of kilter that it's irrelevant. Taxes are going to have to be raised. And the beast needs to be trimmed back. But it can't be starved enough to even begin to cope with our fiscal problem. And this is where I think all the politicians are faking in both parties, but the Republicans especially.

The Republicans think their mission in life is to cut taxes. Sorry, game -- game over. We're now in the tax-raising business. And we're going to be in the tax-raising business for the next decade.

[Dawson Leery]

1. Raise taxes, especially on the top 1%.

The CEO who takes homes millions upon millions regardless of performance needs to pay more.
The speculators/traders/hustlers on Wall Street who take homes millions, and more often now, hundred of millions for
pure manipulation of the system need to pay more.
The military budget needs to be cut. The US cannot be the police of the world. The US should not be paying for Germany's and Japan's defense.
The 40 billion dollar oil subsidy needs to be cut.
Corporate farm subsidies need to be cut.

Please feel free to add to this list.