DAVID STOCKMAN

The Bush White House sold out the birthright of the Republican Party by bailing out Wall Street.

made it a catechism that low taxes solve everything

The military budget got out of control and the tax cuts were helping the wealthy …. President Reagan was less and less interested in what I had to say

Scratch any Republican today and all you will hear is “Tax Cuts, Tax Cuts, Tax Cuts.” Its pure demagoguery…. We have demonized taxes.

The Iranians are not part of the “axis of Evil”. They are part of the axis of Medieval.

it would be nice to have low taxes, but we have to pay our bills in this country.

None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers …. People are getting from A to B and it's not clear how they are getting there....

We are that future generation of the past, inheritors of all the wishful thinking, simple illogic and flawed compromises that produced the near-term benefits our parents and grandparents worried about but ultimately wanted.

Had this attack been allowed to run its course, hundreds of billions in long term debt and equity capital that underpinned the Wall Street based speculation machines would have been wiped out, including large amounts of stock owned by executives and insiders. Such a result would have been truly constructive from a societal vantage point. It would have implanted an abiding 1930s style general lesson about the deadly dangers of leveraged speculation.

This is the craziest presidency in U.S. history.

The Ryan plan isn't a budget. It's the last will and testament of the Republican party.

I don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.

I think everybody benefitted from what I am calling a bubble finance system, a bubble economy and if we're ever going to right the system, we're going to have to stop this explosion of the federal debt. We need huge spending cuts, OK? Don't get me wrong, we need to raise regular taxes too but even beyond that it's not going to hurt if we want to reset the system to ask those who have benefitted disproportionately - remember, we got $60 trillion of net worth in the household sector. $45 trillion of that belongs to the top 5 percent.

Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.

Insanity has infected all the central banks of the world.

We need a wealth tax that on a one-time basis is going to take back at least some small fraction of the great windfall that the upper 1 percent, or 5 percent and pay down the government debt, pay back the federal debt because we can't put this on the next generation or they're going to be buried paying taxes.

I invest in anything that Bernanke can't destroy, including gold, canned beans, bottled water and flashlight batteries.

I think the stock market is a very dangerous place to be at the present time. In fact, the stock market today is almost identical to where it was in October 2007 and then there was a $7 trillion crash and before that in March 2000.

Let's have honest interest rates. Let's let the free market set interest rates in that zone where supply of savings is matched up with demand for real borrowing for capital projects.

I'm just not going to spend a lot of political capital solving some other guy's problem in 2010.

Main Street has too much debt already. It is simply a bonanza for speculators who can borrow the overnight money and then buy something that they can speculate on.

I think everybody in this generation, and I'm the leading edge of the baby boom - I was born in 1946 - has benefitted from a 30-year explosion of debt, which created temporary but unsustainable economic prosperity and a financialization of the system through lower, and lower, and lower interest rates that has created massive rewards to speculation but not real investments so I benefitted from it. Almost everyone who has been in the market has benefitted but they didn't earn it.

I think we're so addicted to bubble finance at the Fed that they can't get out of the corner they painted themselves into. I think the Fed is making federal debt so cheap that Congress has no interest, Washington has no incentive to ever face up to our massive fiscal gap that is going to grow, and grow as we go forward in time and so we have a paralyzed system.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity - just empty sermons.

The Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves.