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John Chuckman, "The President from Podunk Drilling Inc."Anonymous Comrade writes "The President from Podunk Drilling Inc." John Chuckman, January 15, 2004 Thinking people aren't surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole.
It does not take an education in economics to understand how irresponsible Bush's monstrous tax cuts are at the very time American military spending is exploding. The economic mumbo-jumbo of the Reagan era that tax-cut induced growth generates a revenue greater than the lost taxes has been thoroughly discredited by Reagan's legacy of gigantic deficits. No so-called "tax and spend" liberal ever produced such astonishing piles of debt. I would add, that at a time when economic disparity in America is growing vigorously (in good part owing to the effects of globalization on employment and wages for those with the least skills), it is poor public policy to reduce the tax burden on the well-off, especially when that burden already was low by world standards. These taxes finance many forms of needed redistribution including education and healthcare, services already starved of funds, but this kind of thinking is social and could not be expected to carry weight with most Republicans. Many contemporary Republicans seem to reject classical economics, and balanced budgets with sound accounting have evaporated as fitting national responsibilities. Tax cuts have become a form of buying votes, an inverted form of what liberals were long accused of when they promised new programs. And just as with careless promises of new spending, the tax cuts are never done with sound accounting. Voters are not told what services should be cut as the price for reduced taxes -- only the vision of lower taxes is dangled before them. Perhaps voters should know better, but they are conditioned to slick promises of gain twenty-four hours a day on television, including from Bush's spiritual advisors. To a considerable degree, taxes cut at the federal level since Reagan's time have had to be made up by local communities, the very political entities with the least flexibility and wherewithal to increase taxes since they depend largely on property taxes. Maintaining even a token sense of equal opportunity across a large nation in basic services like education and healthcare can only be done with transfers from higher levels of government. But what is true for many communities, whether blighted or small, is true also of states with unfavorable ratios of resources and obligations. You might think a Treasury Secretary with a successful background in international business (quite unlike the President's failed Podunk drilling company -- failed, that is, for investors but not for Bush, who bailed out with handsome profits) worth listening to on such matters, but Paul O'Neill tells us that this President engages in little discussion, sitting mainly in silence at high-level meetings. O'Neill felt in one-on-one meetings as though he were having a conversation with himself.
O'Neill's revelations imply three years of dissimulation by Bush. They imply also months of intense and steady lying as non-existent weapons were talked up, and, of course, Bush's lying to this day about Hussein's non-existent connections to terror. But they imply something more profound that goes to the very meaning of democracy. Bush never submitted the prospect of a conflict to voters. Had he done so, I doubt he could have successfully argued his case, something he hasn't done to this day. O'Neill's account of the first National Security Council meeting has been confirmed by another official who attended but remains anonymous. Bush's lying about Iraq's weapons has been confirmed by a study of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which concluded that the threat from Iraq had been systematically misrepresented. The stupidity of Bush's invasion has been confirmed by the observations of a professor at the Army's War College who characterized it as a costly, pointless distraction.
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