So Stockman yearns for a return to gold-backed money and Calvin Coolidge fiscal policy.  What's not to like if you are a tea-party conservative or Libertarian?  

Amazing though that he left out the single biggest contributing factor in creating our deficit dilemma -- the relentless decline in taxes paid by the 1% over the past five decades.  

In no way would I suggest a return to the highest war time rates of the 50s but I do wish a number cruncher  like Stockman would answer a what-if for me:

What would our public debt be if investment income had been taxed the same as ordinary income over the past five decades.

This guy just bugs the hell out of me.

You know how I know?

Because 32 years ago he bugged the hell out of me and eventually King Reagan too!

that's all I got.

I just watched him on CSPAN over the week-end. And then on Mornin Joke this morning.

I do not like this guy!

A flawed economic analysis of a 'Flawed Economic Analysis' from the extreme right:

RealClearMarkets - David Stockman Brings New Meaning to 'Flawed Economic Analysis'

 

Hedge funds do great work for bringing liquidity and precious market signals to the economy, but the simple truth is that absent the chaos wrought by floating money, the economy would require a great deal less in the way of hedge funds. If this is doubted, readers might look at a chart of the price of oil during the Bretton Woods era. Taking nothing away from the wealth amassed by brilliant traders of the George Soros, Paul Tudor Jones and John Paulson variety, it's a fair bet that absent Nixon's ill-conceived policy error, that the three (along with many of their numerous competitors) would have grown rich through the creation of efficiency-boosting software, a cure for cancer, and transportation advances that would make today's cars look positively pedestrian.

 

Where Stockman got it wrong was in his suggestion that delinking the dollar from gold "meant the end of national financial discipline and the start of a four-decade spree during which we have lived high on the hog, running a cumulative $8 trillion current-account deficit." That's the case because stable money values almost always coincide with investment-attracting growth for investors preferring the certainty of future income streams that won't be debased by monetary authorities. Put simply, stable money attracts investment, and the latter increases the myth that is a ‘trade' or ‘current account' deficit.