“The Country Paid Heavily For The Risks He Took”: It’s Not Too Soon To Judge George W. Bush’s Presidency On Key Issues
In the six years since he left the White House, President George W. Bush has often claimed that it is too early for historical judgments about his presidency. “It’s too soon to say how many of my decisions will turn out,” he wrote in Decision Points, his presidential memoir.
In this, Bush was indulging in what we will call the Truman Consolation. President Harry S. Truman was deeply unpopular during most of his time in the White House and in the years immediately afterward. Only decades later did historians begin to rate his presidency highly for the actions he took in the early years of the Cold War. At one time or another, when their poll ratings are slumping and their media coverage is biting, most modern American presidents like to believe they will eventually be vindicated, just as Truman was.
But Bush is largely wrong: In some of the most important areas of his presidency, it’s not too soon to draw conclusions. Just by judging against Bush’s own forecasts, some of the most far-reaching and important initiatives of his presidency didn’t work — or turned out poorly.
At the top of the list is the war in Iraq. Bush and his advisors badly misjudged what it would entail. They overestimated the international support the United States would be able to obtain for military action. They asserted before the war that American troops would need to stay in Iraq for no more than a couple of years. The administration’s public estimate before the war was that it would cost less than $100 billion; instead, it cost $2 trillion.
Intended originally as a short-term demonstration of American power and influence, the Iraq war over the longer term brought about the opposite. In its unhappy aftermath, Americans became increasingly cautious, more reluctant to become involved overseas. Overall, the war will go down as a strategic blunder of epic proportions, among the most serious in American history.
A similar fate will befall the second-most far-reaching aspect of Bush’s legacy, his historic tax cuts. Bush argued that they would stimulate the economy and spur economic growth. The short-term benefits proved dubious at best, but the harmful long-term consequences were incalculable, both for the federal government and, more importantly, for American society.
When Bush took office, America was in a brief period of budgetary surplus. There was actually a debate, forgotten and almost unimaginable today, about how to use the surplus: Pay down the debt? Launch new federal initiatives? Bush chose to cut taxes, and then did so in ways (tax cuts on dividends and capital gains) that proved immensely beneficial to the wealthiest Americans.
It’s true that President Barack Obama eventually allowed the Bush cuts on upper-income Americans to expire. But the damage had been done. Over the course of nearly a decade, the federal government became increasingly short of funds, while wealthy Americans built up greater and greater assets. Whenever you use a road, bridge or airport that needs repairs (or read a news story about the Pentagon complaining about budget constraints), you might pause to think about the Bush tax cuts and the role they played in shaping the America we see today.
Bush’s second round of tax cuts, in 2003, were historic in another sense. By then, he had already dispatched American troops to Iraq. In every previous military conflict since the Civil War, American presidents had raised taxes to help defray the costs. Bush bucked this historical trend: He lowered them.
It’s true that in a few other policy areas judgments of Bush’s presidency may improve over the years as events unfold and as more information comes to light.
The primary example could be counter-terrorism. The Senate’s recent report on enhanced interrogation techniques makes current judgments on that dark era even harsher than they would have been otherwise. Torture is torture, and no passage of time will change the moral judgments on that.
On the other hand, in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, some Europeans began to ask why the attackers had not been kept under greater surveillance. If such terrorist attacks were to continue over many years, then judgments on the Bush-era surveillance programs might eventually come to be less harsh than they are today. Or they may come to be seen as the true beginning of a new surveillance state. More time needs to pass before historical judgments on this issue can take shape.
Overall, Bush’s presidency is likely to be remembered for his lack of caution and restraint. Once, in the midst of a discussion with his military advisors, Bush made a telling observation: “Someone has got to be risk-averse in this process, and it better be you, because I’m not.”
George W. Bush was certainly not risk-averse. He took gambles both in foreign policy and with the economy. Sometimes they paid off. Yet overall, the country paid heavily for the risks he took. History isn’t likely to revise that judgment.
By: James Mann, Los Angeles Times (TNS), a fellow in residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; The National Memo, February 10, 2015
“Same Conservative Talking Points”: Jeb Bush Won’t Win the GOP Primary If He Keeps Giving Bland Speeches Like This One
On Wednesday, Jeb Bush delivered the biggest speech of his young campaign in Detroit, Michigan, where he promised to lay out a positive agenda in the months ahead. “I will offer a new vision,” the former Florida governor said. “A plan of action that is different than what we have been hearing in Washington D.C.” Political analysts quickly tried to parse Bush’s words to discern any hints about that plan of action.
Those hints are hard to find. Read the transcript; it’s an utterly ordinary speech, filled with bromides against liberalism and big government. Bush cited rising income inequality, stagnant wages, and slow growth as problems that demand big solutions. He talked about the opportunity gap and mentioned Uber and deregulation. And he used the downfall of Detroit as a warning sign for the rest of country. Nothing new, in other words.
Bush did try to spin conservative talking points in a more positive, wonky manner. His most notable comments came about halfway through, when he criticized Washington, D.C.—as in, the Obama administration—for “recklessly degrading the value of work, the incentive to work, and the rewards of work.”
We have seen them cut the definition of a full-time job from 40 to 30 hours, slashing the ability of paycheck earners to make ends meet. We have seen them create welfare programs and tax rules that punish people with lost benefits and higher taxes for moving up those first few rungs of the economic ladder.
In the first sentence, Bush is referring to the provision under the Affordable Care Act that requires employers with more than 50 workers to offer health insurance to any employee that works more than 30 hours. Republicans have criticized the rule as incentivizing employers to reduce their workers’ hours below that threshold. They have suggested changing the definition of a full-time employee to 40 hours per week—a change that the Congressional Budget Office says would increase the deficit and lower the number of Americans with health insurance. Even some conservatives like Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, have come out against it. But it’s a good sound bite—one that shows Bush is aware of ongoing policy arguments in Washington—so he jumped on it.
“Instead of a safety net to cushion our occasional falls,” he added, “they have built a spider web that traps people in perpetual dependence. We have seen them waive the rules that helped so many people escape welfare.”
I had not heard any politician compare the safety net to a “spider web” before, and based on a quick Google search, Bush has not made the comparison before either. It’s reminiscent of Representative Paul Ryan’s analogy of the safety net as a “hammock” that traps the poor in poverty, an analogy that has been harshly criticized. But while a hammock evokes images of laziness and gives agency to the poor, a spider web suggests that the poor are trapped. With many Americans believing that Republicans don’t care enough for the poor, you can understand why Bush settled on the “spider web” analogy.
But does Bush actually reject the “maker and taker” rhetoric? At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent argues yes—or at least that Bush will do so rhetorically. “Message: Jeb Bush will not be 47-percent-ed. He will not be Mitt-ed,” Sargent writes. “He will present a conservative pro-economic-freedom case without committing the fatal political misstep of showing contempt for those who currently depend on government in any form.” That seems broadly right, at least insofar as we can determine Bush’s rhetorical strategy from one speech. Yet, it’s always a tight line to blame government for making the poor dependent without actually blaming the poor themselves.
And when Bush argues that Obama tried to “waive the rules that helped so many people escape welfare,” he’s harkening back to an old, disproven conservative meme against the administration. During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney argued that Obama was undoing welfare reform by offering states waivers allowing them to forego the welfare work requirements, as long as they accomplished the goal of the law— moving welfare recipients to work. In fact, Republican governors had requested the waivers. The Washington Post fact checker gave Romney four Pinnochios for the baseless assertion. But Bush has brought the attack line back.
Overall, Bush seemed to be trying to use the same conservative talking points and attacks, with a more positive spin. Yet, it’s still hard to look at this speech and see what part of the Republican Party it appeals to, at least compared to his competitors. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has a far more comprehensive agenda at this point. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker offers a very conservative governing record and has won three statewide races in four years. Many Republican candidates have switched their economic message to focus on wages and inequality, if only to find a new attack against the president as the recovery strengthens.
Granted, this is just one speech. Bush has plenty of time to deliver concrete policy proposals. But there’s something telling about the ordinariness of his speech, of its generic GOP talking points. There’s no natural constituency for his candidacy, at least in the primary. Bush has said that the GOP nominee must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general.” In other words, to avoid taking far-right positions that doom the candidate in the general election.
Thought about in that light, Bush’s speech makes more sense. Spinning conservative talking points in a positive light, while promising a new agenda, is a campaign platform that could appeal to the full electorate. If he somehow emerged as the Republican nominee, he could be a very credible challenger to Hillary Clinton. Yet, the underlying problem remains: He has to win the nomination. His willingness to lose the primary will, in all likelihood, prove self-fulfilling.
This isn’t just his problem, though; it’s the Republican Party’s. The primary electorate makes it hard for a candidate like Bush, who despite being extremely conservative is nonetheless moderate compared to the other candidates, to win. It forces the eventual nominee to move to the right, eventually putting himself in an almost impossible position to win the general election. The complete blandness of Bush’s speech Wednesday only underlines this dynamic.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, February 5, 2015
“It’s Not Him, Republicans, It’s You”: Mitt Romney Isn’t Running, But His Specter Still Haunts The GOP
I’ll have to admit that I’m a bit surprised Mitt Romney decided not to run for president, given the man’s almost superhuman optimism and persistence. But according to various reports, the torrent of criticism Romney received when he made it clear he was considering a run had a real impact on his final decision, even though in his statement he talked about his faith in “one of our next generation of Republican leaders” (take that, Jeb!) to win back the White House.
The Republican consensus was obviously that Romney represented failure, and they need something different if they are to win in 2016. But maybe Mitt Romney isn’t the problem. It’s not him, Republicans. It’s you.
Nobody would ever claim Romney was anything like a perfect candidate. His background as a private equity titan was particularly fertile ground for Democratic attacks painting him as the representative of the economic elite, and he had a colorful way of reinforcing that impression again and again, particularly with the “47 percent” remark.
But I actually think that if he had decided to run, he would have had a better chance than anyone of getting the Republican nomination. Every GOP primary campaign for the last half-century has begun with an obvious front-runner, and every one of those early front-runners got the nomination. Romney would have been that front-runner, as reluctant as many in the party were about his candidacy. In recent GOP races, the winner hasn’t been the one who defeated his opponents, just the one who outlasted them, as one chucklehead after another became the flavor of the month and then self-immolated (remember when Herman Cain led the primary polls in 2012?). Romney could certainly have stuck around until the end.
But now the 2016 race is truly a free-for-all, with no obvious leader. And if the only lesson Republicans take from 2012 is not to nominate a CEO (sorry, Carly Fiorina), they’ll make the same mistakes all over again.
Consider that “47 percent” remark. It made for a vivid illustration of arguments Democrats were already making, but Mitt Romney was hardly the first Republican to say it. The basic idea underlying it had been repeated endlessly on conservative talk radio and by other Republican politicians for years. If it hadn’t been caught on tape, the attacks from Democrats would have been the same, and the outcome would have been the same. Another example: when Republicans exploded with joy after Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark, Romney didn’t have to convince them to make it a huge issue; they all thought it would be a silver bullet that would take the president down, and they were all flummoxed when it didn’t. They couldn’t imagine that voters wouldn’t punish Obama for an (alleged) criticism of business owners, because they forgot that most Americans work for somebody else.
The prevailing attitude in GOP circles is that Romney failed because he was the wrong messenger. Yet almost every contender is preparing to offer voters the same policy agenda that Romney did. They may be saying now that they’ll talk about wage stagnation and inequality, but when you ask them what they’re going to do about it, their answer is the same as it has always been: cut taxes and cut regulation. It’s going to be awfully hard to convince voters that they’ve had a real change of heart. And anyone who deviates from Republican orthodoxy is already finding themselves on the defensive (as Jeb Bush is for his less-than-total enthusiasm for deportations).
It isn’t surprising that the party’s diagnosis of what went wrong in the last couple of elections won’t extend to the policies they’re offering the public; those positions are rooted in sincere ideological beliefs, and changing them would be hard. But even without Mitt Romney in the race, it looks like Republicans are going to offer a program of Romneyism. They could find themselves facing voters at a time when the economy is doing well overall, and they’re particularly ill-suited to address the structural problems that keep people anxious — two strikes against them. A fresh face is unlikely to solve that problem.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 30, 2015
“He’ll Have Some Explaining To Do”: Another Republican Governor Has Accepted The Medicaid Expansion—And He Might Run For President
Indiana Governor Mike Pence announced Tuesday morning that the Obama administration had approved the state’s plan for accepting the Medicaid expansion. Starting February 1, 350,000 low-income Indianans will be enrolled in Healthy Indiana, the state’s Medicaid program. With the 2016 presidential cycle now underway, political analysts immediately are judging how Pence’s move affects his presidential odds.
The early consensus is that, if indeed Pence decides to run, this decision would cause him trouble in the GOP primary. But the issue poses a dilemma for the Republican Party more broadly, especially its hopes of recapturing the White House. As we saw during the midterms, the Medicaid expansion pits moderate Republicans versus conservatives, governors versus state legislators—and potentially undermines the party’s newfound interest in helping the poor and reducing inequality.
It’s up to governors to decide whether their state accepts the Medicaid expansion, and it’s hard to pass up. The federal government is offering states money to expand Medicaid so that people earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line are eligible for the program. The federal government covers all of the costs from 2014 through 2016 and then that coverage amount phases down slowly to 90 percent by 2022. Governors also face aggressive lobbying from the hospital industry, which is eager to accept the billions of dollars that the federal government transfers to states that expand Medicaid. As a result, 10 states with Republican governors have accepted the expansion over the past few years, and two more, in Tennessee and Wyoming, are considering it.
But some Republican governors have toed the party line, including two likely 2016 candidates: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and former Texas Governor Rick Perry both rejected the expansion. Medicaid, after all, is part of Obamacare, which must be “repealed and replaced.” That’s one reason why most potential Republican candidates—especially those in Congress, like senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio—are opposed to the expansion.
This makes for an interesting rift in the Republican primary.
If Pence runs for president, he’ll have some explaining to do. He would likely argue that he pushed Medicaid in a much more conservative direction through a waiver from the federal government that allows Indiana to require enrollees to contribute a monthly premium to a health savings account, a typical conservative health care idea. He would also likely appeal to his evangelical base by saying that Medicaid expansion is the compassionate thing to do. But he wouldn’t be alone in defending his decision: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accepted the expansion, too. Not known to sidestep an issue or stay on the defensive, Christie could attack the other governors for not taking advantage of the program and hurting their poor constituents, and he might accuse Cruz et al of not understanding how governing works.
The general election is a different story altogether, which brings us to the GOP’s desire to appeal to lower-class voters.
Over the past few weeks, Republicans have begun emphasizing income inequality and stagnant wages. These are important issues, but the GOP’s economic platform still consists largely of deregulation, spending cuts, and lower taxes. That won’t appeal to the poor, particularly compared to the Democratic proposals of free community college and middle-class tax breaks.
That’s where the Medicaid expansion comes in. Denouncing it as Obamacare may work with the Republican primary electorate, but it won’t work in the general election. We saw as much in the midterms, when new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell twisted himself into knots balancing his commitment to repealing Obamacare and promising not to alter the state’s health care exchange and expanded Medicaid program (both of which, of course, were the result of Obamacare). Granted, McConnell won reelection easily, but it does show how the expansion can be a political liability for Republican candidates.
If Christie or Pence emerge from the crowded field, it won’t be a problem. They can tout the expansion as evidence of their committment to fighting inequality. But the opposite is true for the rest of the field. For them, the expansion will be an even bigger liability if income inequality isn’t just Republicans’ flavor of the month, but a major part of their 2016 platform.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, January 27, 2015
“The Wealthy, And Everyone Else”: Big Tax Bills For The Poor, Tiny Ones For The Rich
American politics are dominated by those with money. As such, America’s tax debate is dominated by voices that insist the rich are unduly persecuted by high taxes and that low-income folks are living the high life. Indeed, a new survey by the Pew Research Center recently found that the most financially secure Americans believe “poor people today have it easy.”
The rich are certainly entitled to their own opinions — but, as the old saying goes, nobody is entitled to their own facts. With that in mind, here’s a set of tax facts that’s worth considering: Middle- and low-income Americans are facing far higher state and local tax rates than the wealthy. In all, a comprehensive analysis by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the poorest 20 percent of households pay on average more than twice the effective state and local tax rate (10.9 percent) as the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (5.4 percent).
ITEP researchers say the incongruity derives from state and local governments’ reliance on sales, excise and property taxes rather than on more progressively structured income taxes that increase rates on higher earnings. They argue that the tax disconnect is helping create the largest wealth gap between the rich and middle class in American history.
“In recent years, multiple studies have revealed the growing chasm between the wealthy and everyone else,” Matt Gardner, executive director of ITEP, said. “Upside-down state tax systems didn’t cause the growing income divide, but they certainly exacerbate the problem. State policymakers shouldn’t wring their hands or ignore the problem. They should thoroughly explore and enact tax reform policies that will make their tax systems fairer.”
The 10 states with the largest gap between tax rates on the rich and poor are a politically and geographically diverse group — from traditional Republican bastions such as Texas and Arizona to Democratic strongholds such as Illinois and Washington.
The latter state, reports ITEP, is the most regressive of all. Four years after billionaire moguls such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer funded a campaign to defeat an income tax ballot measure, Washington now makes low-income families pay seven times the effective tax rate that the rich pay. That’s right, those in the poorest 20 percent of Washington households pay on average 16.8 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while Washington’s 1-percenters pay just 2.4 percent of their income. Like many of the other regressive tax states, Washington imposes no personal income tax all.
“The problem with our state tax systems is that we are asking far more of those who can afford the least,” concludes ITEM’s state director Wiehe.
By contrast, the states identified as having the smallest gap in effective tax rates are California, Delaware, Minnesota, Oregon and Vermont — all Democratic strongholds and all relying more heavily on progressively structured income taxes. Montana is the only Republican-leaning state ITEP researchers identify among the states with the least regressive tax rates.
Of course, if you aren’t poor, you may be reading this and thinking that these trends have no real-world impact on your life. But think again: In September, Standard & Poor’s released a study showing that increasing economic inequality hurts economic growth and subsequently reduces public revenue. As important, the report found that the correlation between high inequality and low economic growth was highest in states that relied most heavily on regressive levies such as sales taxes.
In other words, regressive state and local tax policies don’t just harm the poor — they end up harming entire economies. So if altruism doesn’t prompt you to care about unfair tax rates and economic inequality, then it seems self-interest should.
By: David Sirota, Senior Writer at The International Business Times; The National Meno, January 23, 2015
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