“I think the Republicans need to stand rigidly firm and shut the government down for a few days. The Obama White House is weak. If the Republicans hold the line, Obama will fold faster than a lawn chair. And the Republicans will get their $60 billion in reductions.” 
 
 Stockman described the impending showdown as a “wakeup call”—the political equivalent of getting whacked in the head by a two-by-four containing a rusty nail. “Bring it on!” the erstwhile Reagan budget chief told the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove.
– How do you know that shutting down the government is an absolutely terrible idea? Because David Stockman is for it, reasons Dee Dee Myers in Vanity Fair. “Bring it on!” declared Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s one-time budget guru, in a Daily Beast interview. “If the Republicans hold the line, Obama will fold faster than a lawn chair.” Stockman, for the uninitiated, led Reagan’s war on the “welfare state” and once confessed that the president's tax cuts were a “Trojan Horse” to bring down rates on the rich. It’s “kind of hard to sell trickle down,” he said. Now, three decades later, trickle down’s been thoroughly discredited—even George HW Bush called it “voodoo economics”—but Republicans have stuck with it, leading us to these massive deficits, “all in the name of a crackpot ideology,” Myers writes. “So when David Stockman speaks, don’t walk, Republicans, run—as fast as you can, in the opposite direction.”