[Riot]

David Stockman ... the financial guru? History says not successfully. The guy was a 30-year-old kid in the Reagan administration. The author of "supply side economics", a coverup to give tax breaks to the rich, started us on our countries financial disaster. Clinton tried to pull us out, but George W put us right back in the toilet.

Stockman emerged as one of the most powerful and controversial OMB directors ever during a tenure that lasted until his resignation in August 1985. Committed to the doctrine of supply-side economics, he took the lead in directing passage of the "Reagan Budget" (the Gramm-Latta Budget), which Stockman hoped to be a serious curtailment of the "welfare state", gaining a reputation as a tough negotiator with House Speaker Tip O'Neill's Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Majority Leader Howard Baker's Republican-controlled Senate.

Stockman's power within the Reagan Administration waned after the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the famous 18,246 word article, "The Education of David Stockman",[4] in its December 1981 issue, based on lengthy interviews Stockman gave to reporter William Greider. It led to Stockman's being "taken to the woodshed by Reagan" as the White House's public relations team attempted to limit the article's damage to Reagan's perceived fiscal-leadership skills. Stockman was quoted as referring to the Reagan Revolution's legacy tax act as: "I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan's 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.... It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down.' So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory." Of the budget process in his first year on the job, Mr. Stockman is quoted as saying: "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," which was used as the subtitle of the article.

After Stockman's first year at OMB and on the heels of "being taken to the woodshed by the president" over his candor with Atlantic's William Greider, Stockman became inspired with the projected trend of increasingly large federal deficits and the rapidly expanding national debt. On 1 August 1985, he left OMB and later wrote a memoir of his experience in the Reagan Administration titled The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, in which he specifically criticized the failure of congressional Republicans to support a reduction in government spending as necessary offsets to the large tax cuts, in order to avoid the creation of large deficits and an exploding national debt.

Fiscal legacy

Four and a half years into the Reagan administration, upon Stockman's resignation at the OMB in August 1985, the gross federal debt level had nearly doubled with the national debt standing at $1.8 trillion on 9 September 1985.

Stockman's OMB work within the administration in 1981 up to August was dedicated to negotiating with the Senate and House on the next fiscal year's budget, executed later in the fall of 1985, which resulted in the national debt reaching $2.1 trillion at fiscal year end 30 September 1986 and reaching $2.6 trillion at fiscal year end 30 September 1988.