The election of George W. Bush: This generation's greatest tragedy.

[elfs]

Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan have the last word on George W. Bush and Villard "Mitt" Romney. Bartlett:

Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.

Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011.

Sullivan:

When you check reality you find that Bush had a chance to pay off all our national debt before we hit the financial crisis - giving the US enormous flexibility in intervening to ameliorate the recession. Instead, we had to find money for a stimulus in a cupboard stripped bare - its contents largely given away, by an act of choice. I'm tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him for most of it - and remind people that Romney's policies: more tax cuts, more defense spending are identical. With one difference: Bush pledged never "to balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

Mitt Romney has no qualms about doing that very thing. And he will, if he is given the chance.

Remember: Romney's economic team looks a lot like Bush's economic team, only without even the slightest bit of lip-service to a "compassionate" conservatism. Romeny is promising, in the way that all politicians promise, that if you vote for him your tribe will be cared for, and fuck the rest. This is what twelve years of outright one-sided partisan warfare looks like: tribalism so vicious and deep that people like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Melanie Morgan, Ted Nugent, and Glenn Beck openly and without apology call for the "eradication" and "killing" of people not of their tribe.

We could have had the most powerful country in the world, wealthy, debt-free, and capable. Instead, thanks to the twin toxins of a proudly ignorant religious class and a viciously combative rentier class, we're well on our way to being Ghosts with Shit Jobs.

Comments

[tagryn]

To quote the movie Gladiator, "this is a pleasant fiction." As with any analysis, the devil is in the details, specifically the assumptions underlying it. As Barlett notes, the analysis assumes "if policy was unchanged and the economy continued according to forecast."

That's a pretty large assumption to make. It ignores the tidal wave of globalization and efficiencies that stalled out our job creation engine starting early in the 2000s and continues to this day. Those structural changes were already underway and were going to happen regardless of which party was in power. The scary thing is neither side has a strategy for remedying those problems beyond repeating what's already been tried (and failed), and even economists are still scratching their heads as to what needs to be done to get job creation & business domestic investment going again.

As far as the Clinton surplus, Megan McArdle noted in her '09 post (on how both parties use the deficit to flog the other, but don't really act on it once they're in power):

(J)ust for starters, that $800 billion (surplus) was not a real number. The budget surplus was $232 billion in 2000, about $292 billion in today's dollars, or about 2.5% of GDP. That is, coincidentally, about what we lost in revenue when the stock market bubble burst and we lost all that lovely capital gains revenue. The imaginary number comes from assuming "current law" as of 2000. Due to some quirky rules, this does not just mean assuming that Bush didn't spend more or tax less than Clinton. It actually means assuming away some things Clinton *did* do, like the $50 billion annual "temporary" AMT fix.

Moreover, even if this had been something like a real number, we would not have arrived in 2008 with an $800 billion surplus. Any president would have done about what Bush did--some combination of spending it, and cutting taxes. The American public was not going to happily pay an extra 6% of its income to Uncle Sam so that we could pile up some massive wad of cash. And if they had, by 2008, we'd simply have been pointlessly imposing deadweight loss on the American public through unnecessary taxes.

[tagryn]

reply went to spam folder, I think.