David Stockman
Encyclopedia : D : DA : DAV : David Stockman
David Alan Stockman (born November 10, 1946) is a U.S. politician and businessman, serving as U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan 1977-1981 and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget 1981-1985.
Stockman was born in Fort Hood, Texas and educated in the public schools of St. Joseph, Michigan. He graduated from Lakeshore High School in 1964 and received a B.A. from Michigan State University, East Lansing in 1968. He pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, 1968-1970 and 1974-1975. He served as special assistant to United States Representative John Bayard Anderson of Illinois, 1970-1972 and was executive director, United States House of Representatives Republican Conference, 1972-1975.
Stockman was elected to the United States House of Representatives for the Ninety-fifth Congress and was reelected to the Ninety-sixth and Ninety-seventh Congresses, serving from January 3, 1977, until his resignation January 27, 1981 to accept appointment as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
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, Stockman took the lead in directing passage of the "Reagan Budget Cuts" (the Gramm-Latta Budget), which Stockman intended as a serious curtailment of the "welfare state", gaining a reputation as a tough negotiator with the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. Stockman became a leading public face of the so-called "Reagan Revolution", and attracted notoriety when he proposed classifying ketchup as a vegetable for the purposes of federally financed school lunch programs (it would make it cheaper to satisfy the requirements on vegetable content of lunches). The suggestion was widely ridiculed, and the proposal was killed.
Stockman's power within the Reagan Administration waned after the Atlantic magazine published an interview in November 1981 wherein Stockman was quoted as referring to the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut as a "trojan horse" to reduce the tax rate on the top income brackets. By the time of his resignation Stockman had become disillusioned with the large defecit that Stockman saw as arising from Reagan's fiscal policy, which combined large tax cuts with what Stockman considered vastly inadequate spending decreases. In 1986, he wrote a book criticizing the Reagan administration called The Triumph of Politics.
He was managing director of Salomon Brothers and eventually became senior managing director of a New York-based investment bank, the Blackstone Group, in the 1990s. He left Blackstone in 1998 to start his own industrial focused private equity firm, appropriately named Heartland Industrial Partners. The firm was charged with putting $1.3 billion of capital to work by investing in traditional American manufacturing companies. Stockman went on to become the CEO of one of the firm's portfolio companies, Collins and Aikman Corp., a Detroit-based manufacturer of automotive interiors and components. He was ousted from that role days before a Chapter 11 filing on May 17, 2005.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.