[Mb-civic] WORTH A LOOK: Straight talk on Bush - Scot Lehigh - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Straight talk on Bush

By Scot Lehigh  |  March 21, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE MOST UNLIKELY page-turner I read on my winter vacation?

It was ''Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed 
the Reagan Legacy," by former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett.

When party and principles clash, loyalty to team typically trumps 
fidelity to tenets, while rationalization usually supplants 
ratiocination. Not in this case, however. Bartlett values his ideals 
enough to speak important truths about a president of his own party.

 From the policy-generation process to tax cuts to spending to free 
trade, the author portrays the Bush record as dismal. Because 
partisanship imparts a certain imperviousness to facts (on both sides of 
the ideological aisle), criticisms of this administration are too often 
shrugged off, at least by the right-wing talk-radio crowd, as political 
carping.

It will be hard to dismiss Bartlett's book that way. A confirmed 
Reaganite, he not only worked in the Gipper's White House but went on to 
serve as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy during the last 
few months of Reagan's presidency and all of George H.W. Bush's.

One particularly troubling trait of the current White House, Bartlett 
writes, has been its ''total subordination of analysis to short-term 
politics." A second ''is a disregard for established economic agencies 
and total reliance on a small cadre of White House staffers, many with 
no substantive economic backgrounds, who regularly overrule those with 
experience and expertise on issues under discussion."

And consider the honesty it takes for a conservative to make this point: 
When it comes to fiscal responsibility, Bill Clinton's record is better 
than George W. Bush's.

Praising Clinton for deficit reduction, spending discipline, federal 
workforce reductions, and welfare reform, Bartlett writes that ''for 
those reasons, growing numbers of conservatives now view Clinton as 
having governed as one of them -- at least on economic policy."

One shortcoming: Although Bartlett criticizes the Bush tax cuts as 
poorly designed, he never quite acknowledges how much of the huge yearly 
budget deficits result from them.

 From fiscal year 2001 through fiscal year 2005, ''tax cuts and new 
spending contributed roughly equally to the increase in the deficit," 
says Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a 
nonpartisan budgetary watchdog.

Bartlett, who labels George W. Bush ''one of the most free-spending 
presidents on record," is focused much more on that aspect of the ledger.

He's particularly exercised about the Medicare prescription drug 
benefit. That legislation was billed as a plan that would cost $400 
billion over its first 10 years. However, it quickly turned out that the 
true cost of the bill had been concealed. The real price tag for the 
first 10 years is $557 billion. Meanwhile, a more representative 
decade-long cost, for the years from 2006 to 2015, is now put at more 
than $700 billion.

That benefit alone will consume 1.9 percent of gross domestic product 
virtually forever, Bartlett says. ''In 2005, this would have come to 
$232 billion -- more than all the corporate income taxes collected by 
the federal government and 26 percent of all personal income taxes," he 
writes. ''In other words, the individual income tax would have to rise 
by 26 percent immediately and forever just to pay for the drug program."

It's worth noting that if Bush has been a spendthrift, the Democrats 
have hardly distinguished themselves. One depressing memory of the 2004 
presidential campaign was watching the Democratic candidates tumble over 
themselves in their hurry to tell seniors that the new drug benefit 
simply wasn't generous enough.

Bartlett underscores another important idea: Although Bush likes to 
style himself a tax-cutter, in reality his borrow-and-spend fiscal 
policies have made a future tax hike virtually inevitable.

Or, to put it another way, because they haven't held spending to what 
revenues will support, Bush and Congress are sending part of the tab for 
current programs to future taxpayers, who will eventually have to make 
good our bills.

''Bush may turn out to be extraordinarily lucky and avoid having to face 
the consequences of his own fiscal actions, especially the hugely 
ill-conceived Medicare drug bill, and the burden of enacting a major tax 
increase may fall on his successor," Bartlett writes. ''But it will be 
Bush's fault even if someone else ends up paying the political price."

It may not be everyone's idea of a race-through beach read, but 
Bartlett's is a thought-provoking book -- one that merits more attention 
than apologists for this administration are likely to give it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/21/straight_talk_on_bush/
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