R.I.P.: 'Reaganomics Revolution' 1981-2011
How Gramm's three meltdowns sabotage America's conservative principles
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their entrances and their exits." Two years ago conservatives predicted a "permanent majority" lasting "for years, maybe decades." No exit. But the hubris gods had other plans.
Now the "final act" of the Reagan Revolution's glory days is being scripted, in grand Shakespearean style, not for 2008 but in 2011.
. . . Oddsmakers now favor McCain, so the final act of the Reagan Revolution may indeed be delayed four years.
Why? If McCain wins the betting gods favor former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, McCain's chief economic adviser, as the new Secretary of the Treasury. Yes, the same Gramm who recently dismissed the subprime-housing meltdown as a "mental recession" in the minds of America's "whiners."
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Gramm as Reaganomics' inner 'wrecking crew'
In a McCain presidency Gramm will vastly increase the wreckage he's been foisting on the America economy for a long time. In June Stephen Moore interviewed Gramm in the Wall Street Journal: "For two decades the man who came to be called 'Dr. No' had earned a reputation as a one-man wrecking crew of big-government legislative priorities. ... The record confirms that Mr. Gramm played a decisive role in nearly every fiscal conservative victory in the 1980s and '90s -- from the Reagan budget and tax cuts to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley banking reforms," which in 1999 repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that separated commercial and investment banking. That set the stage for America's current subprime-credit meltdown.
Why script Gramm's Treasury as a Shakespearean tragedy? Ask any lobbyist: Every election has less to do with who's president and everything to do with their cast of characters: They pick 20 cabinet officers as well as control 6,722 other senior bureaucrats running agencies like the FDA, FAA, SEC, CIA, Environmental Protection, Science and Technology, Economic Advisers. There's power in casting.
McCain will pick conservatives to extend the Reagan Revolution. Remember Cheney in the shadows, backstage dominating the current Reagan Revolution revival? In McCain's revival, much like Cheney, Gramm will "steal the show" till 2011 when his luck runs out because the Gramm "wrecking crew" will so distort Reaganomic principles beyond recognition, triggering his third meltdown, thus ending the great Reagan Revolution from within by one of its key disciples.
Yes, I said three meltdowns from the Gramm "wrecking crew." . . . .
1. Gramm, Enron and the dot-com meltdown 2000
. . . . . (You have to read about Wendy's involvement in Enron and her role in the collapse)
2. Gramm, UBS and the subprime meltdown 2007
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3. Gramm and the U.S. Treasury meltdown of 2011 :rof: (only if McCain wins the election in Nov.)
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