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How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy
Doubleday
February 2006
320 pages ISBN: 0385518277 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
George W. Bush came to the presidency in 2000 claiming to be
the heir of Ronald Reagan. But while he did cut taxes, in
most other respects he has governed in a way utterly unlike
his revered predecessor, expanding the size and scope of
government, letting immigration go unchecked, and allowing
the federal budget to mushroom out of control.
Despite their strong misgivings, most conservatives
remained silent during Bush's first term. But a series of
missteps and scandals, culminating in the ill-conceived
nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, has
brought this hidden rift within the conservative movement
crashing to the surface.
Now, in what is sure to be
the political book of the season, Bruce Bartlett lays bare
the incompetence and profligacy of Bush's economic policies.
A highly respected Washington economist--and true-believing
Reaganite--Bartlett started out as a supporter of Bush and
helped him craft his tax cuts. But he was dismayed by the
way they were executed. Reagan combined his tax cuts with
fiscal restraint, but Bush has done the opposite. Bartlett
thus reluctantly concluded that Bush is not a Reaganite at
all, but an unprincipled opportunist who will do whatever he
or his advisers think is expedient to buy votes.
In
this sober, thorough, and utterly devastating book, Bartlett
attacks the Bush Administration's economic performance root
and branch, from the "stovepiping" of its policy process to
the coercive tactics used to ram its policies through
Congress, to the effects of the policies themselves. He is
especially hard on Bush's enormous new Medicare
entitlement...and predicts that within a few years, Bush's tax
cuts and unrestricted spending will produce an economic
crisis that will require a major tax increase, probably in
the form of a European-style VAT.
Bartlett has
surprisingly kind words for Bill Clinton, whose record on
the budget was far better than Bush's. Whatever else one may
think of him, Bartlett argues, Clinton cut spending,
abolished a federal entitlement program, and left a budget
surplus. By contrast, Bush has increased spending, created a
massive entitlement program, and produced the biggest
deficits in American history.
In fact, Bartlett
concludes, Bush is less like Reagan than like Nixon: an
arch-conservative Republican, bitterly hated by liberals,
who vainly tried to woo moderates by enacting big parts of
the liberal program. It didn't work then, and it won't work
now--and may have similar harmful effects for the GOP.
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