ABSTRACT
Cutting taxes, raising defense expenditures, and balancing the budget were simply incompatible, the President’s 1981 ERP Report notwithstanding. The OMB computer, working in the dark of night, had predicted budget deficits unlike those of any previous administration. Stockman, from early on, was obsessed with balancing the budget. Losing revenue by cutting taxes required cutting government expenditures to whatever extent necessary to balance the budget. Stockman had not been an early advocate of classical supply-side economics. His conversion was later than most and his departure sooner. One must admire Stockman’s candor and his ability to learn—and to change. As a student at Michigan State University in the 1960s, by Greider’s account, he read Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Goodman and became a leader of the campus radicals against the Vietnam War.
