David Brooks discusses a recent National Journal piece in which economists grade the President. The President receives the following grades:
a B-plus for short-term fiscal policy,
a C-minus for long-term fiscal policy,
a B for regulatory policy and
a B-minus for trade and international economics.
That leads to a GPA a little shy of B-. Brooks reports that the President's team defends itself as engineering a response to the possible economic catastrophe--which, they say, faced them as they entered office.
Brooks writes: 'They decided to do what was necessary to head off any immediate catastrophe. As Stephen Friedman, director of the National Economic Council, sums it up, "We didn't want to err on the light side when it comes to stimulus." Hence, the large tax cuts.'
This, of course, is a convenient rewrite of history. Bush campaigned on tax cuts as the appropriate response to the economic good times that existed during the Clinton years. The tax cut was not some emergency policy--it was their campaign platform.
Here's the proof; quotes from the GOP platform from 2000:
"The federal government has operated in the black for the last two years and is now projected to run a surplus of nearly $5 trillion over ten years.
That wasn't magic. It took honesty and guts from a Congress that manages the nation's purse strings. Over a five year period, as surpluses continue to grow, we will return half a trillion dollars to the taxpayers who really own it, without touching the Social Security surplus."
"It takes both candor and courage to say, as George W. Bush has said, that, even in times of large surpluses, the economy is far from perfect and we should not be satisfied with the status quo. Budget surpluses are the result of over-taxation of the American people. The weak link in the chain of prosperity is the tax system. It not only burdens the American people; it threatens to slow, and perhaps to reverse, the economic expansion..."
Tax cuts were the Bush Administration's one-size-fits-all policy, their salve for good times and bad, not some emergency policy to respond to problems someone else had created.