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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (66284)	2/9/2001 11:44:13 AM
From: flatsville	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

No Les. "Rosey Scenario" was what Stockman called his "scam." The man charged to make this all work was David Stockman, Reagan's budget director. Stockman's genius and mastery of numbers was matched only by his relatively young age, which earned him the title of "whiz kid." Stockman, Roberts and Anderson came up with a massively optimistic forecast for the economy, which today Stockman derisively refers to as the "Rosy Scenario." The Rosy Scenario predicted that the 1981 tax cuts would produce 5 percent growth in 1982. (In fact, 1982 was the worst year since World War II, with negative growth of 2.2 percent.) Many budget-watchers pointed out that the tax cuts would only increase the deficit, but Stockman silenced all his critics with a blizzard of statistics and information. "Like a child prodigy chess champion playing fifty matches at once, Stockman answered every query, parried every countermove, checked every challenge," Smith writes. "Congress was mesmerized." Today, Stockman admits it was all a performance. "Even the appearance of being an expert is self-validating," he wrote five years later. "I didn't know much about budgets, but I knew more than the rest of them."