When it was published at the end of 1981, the article got enormous attention because the OMB director, who’d been a Harvard theology grad student before he got into politics, was astoundingly honest. The Reagan administration had managed that summer to convince Congress, including the Democratic House, to make the richest Americans’ top tax rate lower than it had been anytime in the previous half-century. Stockman admitted in the article that that had really been the entire point. Because politically it would’ve been “hard to sell ‘trickle down,’ ” he explained, “the supply-side formula was
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