Glad you're here! Stockman has oodles of major flaws. I read his book a long time ago, and it was pretty infuriating. It talked about the complete sham the whole reaganomics fairytale was. There were two major characters in that fairytale. One was "Magic Asterisk" and the other was "Rosy Scenario." They built the whole budget scheme on a bunch of air. The foundation was wishes and fingers crossed. It'll all work out if you just add in this asterisk and call it balanced! See? We've got this! No worries! It all works just fine! Now let's all move on! It was all embroidered out of empty promises and make-believe. It came straight from the little room with the porcelain throne in it. Their cockamamie ideas only worked when you plugged all the holes with wadded-up pieces of toilet paper and maybe some toothpaste. The whole sorry affair was, to riff on the Blues Brothers, a "wish sandwich." You have two pieces of bread, and you wish you had some meat.
And after engineering, and advocating it for his term of service in the reagan administration, David Stockman actually woke up one day and smelled how bitter and burnt the coffee actually was. They ALWAYS wake up LONG AFTER their damage was done. It's like his former boss finally woke up to the idea of even MENTIONING the crisis of AIDS, and only YEARS after hundreds of thousands of Americans had been afflicted, suffered, and died too young - their plight flatly and baldly ignored for all that time.
GOD that was an awful time in America. AWFUL!!! I sometimes struggle to decide which era was worse, the reagan era or the bush/cheney era. It's a difficult call, except that the reagan era made bush/cheney possible, even inevitable. That era where they just frickin' WORSHIPPED the guy, certainly paved the way for all the look-the-other-way crap, and free passes and no questioning or challenging, and other "journalistic" failures of the mass media while they just frickin' ADORED the guy. The utter adoration was at times completely nauseating! To this very day, I'm afraid, all I can find that's good about ronald reagan is that he's dead.
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