David Stockman, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan and largely crafted Reagan’s fiscal policy, published a column in the Daily Beast excoriating Mitt Romney’s claim that being a private equity executive makes one a job creator and, thus, qualified to be president. Stockman wrote:

Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better. [...]

The larger point is that Romney’s personal experience in the nation’s financial casinos is no mark against his character or competence. I’ve made money and lost it and know what it is like to be judged. But that experience doesn’t translate into answers on the great public issues before the nation, either. The Romney campaign’s feckless narrative that private equity generates real economic efficiency and societal wealth is dead wrong.

Stockman, who also worked in private equity during his career, used much of the column to criticize the Federal Reserve, a constant target of his ire. But his overall point aligns with that made by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who said that Romney “makes his money the same way I make my money. He makes money by moving around big bucks, not by straining his back and going to work cleaning the toilets or whatever it may be. He makes it shoving around money.”

Stockman has been a thorn in the side of the GOP over the last few years, criticizing its fealty to tax cuts above all else. “After 1985, the Republican Party adopted the idea that tax cuts can solve the whole problem, and that therefore in the future, deficits didn’t matter and tax cuts would be the solution of first, second, and third resort,” he said. He also said that the House Republican budget authored by Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan “boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate” and “is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices.”

Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget — which gives massive tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest Americans, drastically slashes funding for social programs, decimates state budgets, and still ends up ultimately raising the deficit — has garnered critics ranging from Catholic bishops to top economists. Yesterday, former President Reagan’s budget adviser, David Stockman, added his voice to the dissent.

Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan administration, blasted Ryan’s budget as an “empty conservative sermon” and “fairy tale” in an op-ed published in the New York Times:

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends.

…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.

Stockman’s scathing critique of the Ryan budget also notes that it preserves an unnecessarily large national security budget that currently “saddle[s] our bankrupt nation” and continues to eschew regulations for “dangerous” Wall Street banks.

Stockman isn’t the first Republican to oppose Ryan’s extreme budget plan. Reps. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) and David McKinley (R-WV) have refused to support Ryan’s budget because they recognize its draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will negatively impact residents in their states. Donald Trump has referred to Ryan’s plan as a “big mistake” and a “dangerous plan for Mitt Romney” to support.

Last fall, when President Obama debuted the Buffett Rule — the simple idea that millionaires and billionaires should pay at least the same tax rate as middle class workers — we climbed into the wayback machine and found a video of President Ronald Reagan decrying “crazy” tax loopholes (originally stated on June 6, 1985) that allowed a millionaire to pay a lower tax rate than a bus driver.

With the Senate set to vote one week from today on a Buffett Rule bill that would make sure millionaires and billionaires pay a minimum tax rate of 30 percent, we now present another video of former President Reagan supporting the principle behind the Buffett Rule (originally stated on June 28, 1985).  In today’s video, President Reagan describes a letter he received from an executive who wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why it’s “wrong” that he was able to “take advantage of the present tax code” to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. Watch it:

Sounds pretty familiar.

We need to build an economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged few.  We can start by passing the Buffett Rule to make sure millionaires and billionaires can no longer take advantage of unfair tax loopholes to pay a lower tax rate than millions of middle class workers.

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania — Republican lawmakers who vote for tax increases are “rat heads in a Coke bottle,” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist said during a speech Friday at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, a conservative gathering where he was a featured speaker.

Last week, Norquist called Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval a “rat” for supporting tax increases. This week, Norquist expanded the attack, saying that the same way Coca-Cola would lose customers if a rat head was found in a Coke bottle, Republicans voting for tax increases “damage the brand.” Instead, Norquist said, the GOP needs conservatives like former President Ronald Reagan who oppose taxes at all costs:

NORQUIST: Don’t raise taxes. Tax reform? Sure. Reduce rates, broaden the base, like Reagan did. … No net tax increases! [...]

Republican elected officials who vote for tax increases are rat heads in a Coke bottle.

Watch it:

By invoking Reagan to make his case, however, Norquist is again ignoring Reagan’s legacy. Reagan was a serial revenue raiser, hiking taxes a total of 11 times and in seven of his eight years in office. His 1982 tax increase was the largest peacetime increase in American history, and contrary to Norquist’s anti-tax beliefs, was immediately followed by “exceptionally strong” economic and job growth.

Norquist, of course, is well aware of Reagan’s tax raising legacy, he just chooses to ignore it. In a recent appearance on The Daily Show, Norquist laughably refused to criticize Reagan, saying he didn’t hold the tax increases against the conservative hero because “he hadn’t signed the pledge.”

Republicans have continually decried the Obama Administration’s “runaway spending” since he took office, blaming him for growing deficits and a mounting national debt. But a quick glance at the facts show that, compared to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, Obama is actually embracing fiscal conservatism more than any other president in recent history, with the exception of fellow Democrat Bill Clinton.

The Atlantic crunches the numbers:

For all the talk you hear about Obama’s historic spree, government spending actually hasn’t increased so dramatically under this president. The stimulus was big, but it’s over. It’s been replaced by, if not austerity (which has struck our states and cities) then a hard correction to the center.

Evidence of the cost-cutting measures employed by Obama can be found in the last several jobs reports. While the overall number of jobs created has steadily increased for the last several months, those advances have all come entirely in the private sector. Public sector jobs have actually been on the decline for much of the last year as government spending on some agencies and programs have been cut.

Economics Professor Mark Thoma provides a helpful chart on his blog that puts President Obama’s per capita spending into context, comparing it with the spending of every president in the last 40 years.

That’s likely a hard pill to swallow for Obama’s critics, who have spent years hammering his administration for record spending and fiscal irresponsibility. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put it best: “Going by federal expenditures…it would seem that if Obama’s a socialist, Ronald Reagan is Karl Marx with an ICBM.”