Sunday, December 12, 2010

THE UNBEARABLE SMUGNESS OF THE KLEPTOCRACY



FORMER REAGAN ADVISOR ANGRY BUSH 'BANKRUPTED AMERICA'

04/18/2007 @ 11:49 am
Filed by RAW STORY

Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett accused President Bush of "bankrupting" America and betraying the Reagan legacy in an interview on PBS's Tavis Smiley Show on Tuesday....

TAVIS SMILEY: Bruce Bartlett is a columnist who served as economic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and later Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department under the first President Bush. The most recent book is "Imposter: How George W. Bush bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
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TAVIS SMILEY: Did George W. Bush do all of that?
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BRUCE BARTLETT: Bankrupt America? Yes, I think that we have had something like a $20 trillion increase in the national debt under this president's watch and I think that one of these days, I don't know when, but one of these days, the chickens are going to come home to roost.
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BRUCE BARTLETT: … it appears in retrospect this president didn't really have any clear economic plan. A lot of things were done in an ad hoc basis or based solely on political considerations without much thought as to how all the pieces fit together.
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BRUCE BARTLETT: . Secondly, I think a lot of the tax cuts were not well designed to help with economic growth and were really just the tax equivalent of pork barrel spending, just special deals for special groups. And as a consequence I don't think we have really gotten the economic benefits of the tax cuts
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BRUCE BARTLETT: As an economist, you look at tax cuts, different kinds of tax cuts they have different effects on the economy. Some have very positive effects, some have virtually no effect at all. Some might have negative effects. If you look at the whole menu of all the different kinds of tax cuts that this president enacted, only some of them were really very helpful to economic growth and a lot of the others were not. They were just revenue that was lost to no purpose of any kind whatsoever.
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BRUCE BARTLETT: . This president doesn't care one whit about the fiscal situation, doesn't worry at all about deficits or debt.

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