The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America
by David A. Stockman, published 2013
David Stockman was the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from 1981 through 1985 until he resigned in frustration from the Reagan White House. The desire to set the record straight on a failed political crusade (“The Reagan Revolution”) by a knight who feels betrayed by the politics of the crusade itself is strongly felt throughout Stockman’s polemical revisionism of the Reagan years and the regimes that set the stage for this period and whose stage was set in turn by Reagan’s failed policies.
In Part II, Stockman asserts that the Reagan defense budget process resulted in an unprecedented commitment to real top line growth that was arbitrary in calculation and resulted in almost no creation of additional anti-Soviet nuclear deterrent capability which was the stated need for the top line increase. Instead of getting more nuclear subs and nuclear-tipped ICBMs (which Stockman insists weren’t needed anyway), the Reagan spending was used to green light hundreds of billions of dollars worth of conventional military purchases on DoD shopping lists ranging from naval carrier groups to attack helicopters to tank fleets and front line soldiery. Not only was the supposed Soviet nuclear buildup non-existent due to the Soviet Union’s own decrepit economic system and ill envisaged forays into places like Afghanistan, but this conventional force build-up could do nothing to stop a Soviet nuclear first strike and in time proved to be good for nothing other than projecting American imperial might across the globe via conventional military conquest and occupation of targeted nations. The spending increase accomplished little more than to further exacerbate the problem of federal deficit finance and the future financial bubble of the late 90s and 2000s because the increase in spending was not offset with additional tax increases.
Stockman also challenges the idea that Reagan cut back on welfare entitlements. Stockman argues that he tried but then gave up under political pressure during the failed “Schweicker” gambit. This resulted in Republican acknowledgement that federal welfare entitlements such as the Social Security Administration were political sacred cows, committing the government to continued and growing structural deficits related to their funding and concluding in the short term with a Republican administration stewarding a thinly veiled payroll tax increase under the Greenspan solvency plan. Stockman suggests this was a critical political turning point for the Republican party which led them to shed their last fiscal conservancy feathers in favor of a more Keynesian stance of attempting to juice the economy through periodic tax cuts and business subsidies rather than by imposing fiscal rectitude on the government’s programs by cutting spending.
Now an obvious question at this point is, why didn’t all this spending and deficit finance create hyperinflation in the US as the Fed balance sheet tripled and bank credit expanded by an even greater multiple? Stockman’s answer is that when Nixon screwed the monetary pooch by deciding the freely float the US dollar, he ended up getting a free pass because the major trading partners of the US, especially in Asia (read: China and Japan) engaged in competitive currency devaluation to maintain their currency pegs. And the reason they did this is because their governments and local politics were dominated by mercantilist beliefs and export-oriented structures. Letting their currencies and interest rates rise against the US dollar would have caused painful adjustments to occur in home markets and industries that the various political regimes had no interest in making. The end result is that Nixon’s arbitrary gaming of the US economy via direct monetary manipulation in order to secure an economic boom as he approached reelection did cause problems and inflationary pressures at home (including unprecedented jumps in peacetime cost of living indexes and a commodity price boom) but it did not get completely off the rails because global central banks, guided by their home regimes, wouldn’t let it.
Again, Stockman argues that this was not only a short term economic disaster for the country, but it was also a long term political disaster because the fact that this happened under a Republican administration and was signed off on by the biggest “free market economists” of the day after the meeting with Nixon at Camp David meant that going forward there would be no real political or intellectual resistance to the agenda of perpetual deficit finance and continuous bubble-making in the economy that such a fiscal regime allows for.
A House Rises 