MONEY MATTERS

President Bush’s two main initiatives were tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq. But the public look at these two initiatives as failures. Tax cuts never yielded the promised prosperity but converted a budget surplus into a persistent deficit. By 2008 a majority of the public believed that the war on Iraq was not only a mistake but the Bush administration deliberately led the nation into war. Now the Republicans are taking measures to rehabilitate Bush’s image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, declared last week that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” But the actual record of Bush years was two and half years of declining employment, followed by four and half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight year average under Bill Clinton, followed by a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of “Bush boom,” such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000. Bush’s administration ended with a broad financial and economic collapse. This deficit caused the deficit to soar.

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