The fault line in American politics is not really between Republicans and Democrats, but rather between taxpayers and the Washington political elite. Here is a perfect example that symbolizes why economic policy is such a mess. President Bush’s former top aide, Karl Rove, makes the case in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama Administration has been fiscally irresponsible. That’s certainly true, but as I’ve pointed out on previous occasions (here and here), Rove has zero credibility on these issues. In the excerpt below, Rove attacks Obama for earmarks, but this corrupt form of pork-barrel spending skyrocketed during the Bush years. He attacks Obama for government-run healthcare, but Rove helped push through Congress a reckless new entitlement for prescription drugs. He attacks Obama for misusing TARP, but the Bush Administration created that no-strings-attached bailout program. These are examples of hypocrisy, but Rove also is willing to prevaricate. He blames Obama for boosting the burden of government spending to 24 percent of GDP, but it was the Bush Administration that boosted the federal government from 18.2 percent of GDP in 2001 to 24.7 percent of GDP in 2009. Obama is guilty of following similar policies and maintaining a bloated budget, but it was Bush (with Rove’s guidance) that drove the economy into a fiscal ditch.
The president’s problem is largely a mess of his own making. Deficit spending did not begin when Mr. Obama took office. But he and his Democratic allies have supported, proposed, passed or signed and then spent every dime that’s gone out the door since Jan. 20, 2009. Voters know it is Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders who approved a $410 billion supplemental (complete with 8,500 earmarks) in the middle of the last fiscal year, and then passed a record-spending budget for this one. Mr. Obama and Democrats approved an $862 billion stimulus and a $1 trillion health-care overhaul, and they now are trying to add $266 billion in “temporary” stimulus spending to permanently raise the budget baseline. It is the president and Congressional allies who refuse to return the $447 billion unspent stimulus dollars and want to use repayments of TARP loans for more spending rather than reducing the deficit. It is the president who gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to draw hundreds of billions from the Treasury. It is the Democrats’ profligacy that raised the share of the GDP taken by the federal government to 24% this fiscal year. This is indeed the road to fiscal hell, and it’s been paved by the president and his party.
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Your points about the Bush administration are correct, but so are Rove’s points about what has happened since Obama took office. Also, let’s remember who was in charge of the budget the last two years of the Bush administration – Pelosi, Reid and the Democrats. And, Rove was gone about that time. Shame on Bush for signing those irresponsible Democratic budgets, but, as a previous commenter has pointed out, the difference between the Bush spending and that under the Obama regime is like the difference between pot and crack.
Oh boy.
So you tell your kid not to smoke pot, and he says “Ah hah Dad, you smoked pot when you were my age you have no credibility!”
If you think this translates into an iron-clad argument justifying your kid’s pot-smoking — actually, to preserve the integrity of the analogy, your kid should graduate into much tougher stuff like crystal meth and feel justified in doing that as well — then, and only then, this post of yours makes sense. The logic is exactly the same.
I see where you’re coming from about Rove and the Bush administration, but when you’re evaluating whether a point is valid or not, it really doesn’t matter who’s pointing it out.
[…] Dan Mitchell spanks everyone, bitch slaps Karl Rove into a groveling bucket of incompetent gruel. […]