David Stockman, budget director under Ronald Reagan and a consummate insider, slams the recent tax cut deal that was passed with such speed and bipartisanship:

What we’re doing is perpetuating the most colossal fiscal mistake in history. These tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts were originally put in in 2001, 2003. They were premised on the prospect of a five trillion budget surplus over the coming 10 years, and the idea was to give some money back to the taxpayer.

Well, here we are 10 years later, two unfinanced wars, housing boom and bust, and bailouts everywhere, the huge stimulus programs, massive deficits have broken out. And in that 10 years, we’ve actually had five trillion of deficits.

So, we have accomplished over the last decade a $10 trillion swing from an illusory surplus to a gigantic deficit. And therefore, it just underscores even more as unaffordable as they were a decade ago. It is utter folly in the face of this deficit to be extending them. (My italics)
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The idea of this will stimulate domestic production and jobs as wrong. That’s an obsolete idea that may have been true 40 years ago. But today, given that we buy almost everything we consume from abroad, this tax cut-induced spending really is going to stimulate the Chinese economy, not ours, build up our debt further and require that we borrow from China so that we can increase the deficit here in the United States.

When one of the architects of Reagonomics (whose views haven’t changed much since those days) blasts away at the fiscal irresponsibility in government and comes off as a militant progressive, you know that the greed of the oligarchy is out of control.