David Stockman: 'Deficit Reduction “Flimflam & Swindle,” Taxes Must Rise'

from yahoo finance................

"Official Washington congratulated itself for reaching a deal to cut $38 billion from the deficit of the current fiscal year. But some observers aren't impressed. "Flimflam & swindle," is how David Stockman characterized the deal in a recent Fiscal Times column.

"I've seen a lot of accounting smoke and mirrors in my day in government, but this was beyond the pale," said Stockman, my guest on Daily Ticker. "There was nothing real and substantive that actually cuts something and saves a dollar in the whole thing. I calculated, the cash reduction might be a couple of billion dollars."

Stockman knows his way around the budget process. A foot-soldier in the Reagan revolution, he was the youthful director of the Office of Management and Budget during Reagan's first term, and became disillusioned with supply-side economics and the policies that paired large tax cuts and large deficits. His Washington misadventures were chronicled in William Greider's classic The Education of David Stockman and in a memoir, The Triumph of Politics. Stockman spent several years as an investment banker at the Blackstone Group before starting his own investment fund, Heartland Industrial Partners, which invested in manufacturing companies in the Midwest"...........read it here