Shoveling some Snow

December 21, 2005

I can appreciate the awkwardness the administration must feel when it comes to their enormous, record-breaking budget deficits. The president ran in 2000 on a platform that not only called for a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution, but insisted that deficits were “dangerous” for the economy. Once in office, inheriting the largest-ever surplus from his predecessor, Bush vowed to pay down “an unprecedented amount of our national debt.” That was then. As the nation now knows, of course, the president is easily the most fiscally irresponsible person to ever occupy the Oval Office.

So, yes, I can understand a certain sense of embarrassment, but there’s just no reason for administration officials to humiliate themselves by spouting transparent nonsense.

President Bill Clinton left office in 2001 with a federal budget surplus of $127 billion. President George Bush ran a deficit of $319 billion in 2005. So who deserves more credit for fighting red ink?

No question, says Treasury Secretary John Snow: It’s his boss, Bush. Sipping a latte at a Starbucks coffee shop with reporters in Washington two days ago, he said that “the president’s legacy will be one of having significantly reduced the deficit in his time,” and said Clinton’s budget was a “mirage” and “wasn’t a real surplus.”

Snow said the Clinton surplus was inflated by a stock-price bubble and that Bush will be remembered for cutting the gap from a record $412 billion in the 2004 fiscal year.

I couldn’t make this up if I tried. According to the Treasury Secretary, the president with the best record in American history on improving the nation’s finances deserves no credit, while the president with the worst record in history deserves praise. It’s like I’m stuck in a Twilight Zone episode. As the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann said, “Snow’s comment would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetically and obviously inaccurate.”

If I understand Snow’s “bubble” argument, the idea is that stock market growth in the late 1990s helped fill the Treasury by way of capital gains taxes. So, when the budget was over $100 billion in the black, it wasn’t a figure that could be expected to last, especially if capital gains rates were going to be reduced significantly. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but if Clinton’s surplus “wasn’t a real surplus,” why did the Bush administration cut taxes by $2 trillion based on the forecasted surpluses that they assumed would continue?

As for Snow’s point that Bush’s deficits will be “the president’s legacy,” on this, I completely agree.

There will be lots of competition for what will be the defining symbol of this president’s legacy.

  • i don’t have the time to look it up right now, but when you bother to look at the numbers, the amount of cap gains taxes that were collected in the late ’90s were nowhere close to the total shift in budget position under Clinton.

    in addition, you can’t claim that every single dollar collected in cap gains taxes in the late ’90s was due to the internet bubble, so when you discount for an “average” level of cap gains collections (which i don’t think you need to do, but that’s an argument for another time), then the “mirage” cap gains were in the tens of billions, useful but hardly the total picture.

    Snow, of course, is a dishonest hack of the first rank, an example of how the people around bush are largely people who have been peter principled up to their level of incompetence.

  • “True, in the past there was a surplus and now there are deficits, but the buddha states that the surplus was an illusion then, just as the deficits are an illusion now. All praise buddha!”
    Quote from the war-buddha, George W.

  • I think we have already established that no economist who is serious about their field is willing to accept a job in this administration. It just does not fit. Harry Truman asked for a one handed economist because they all told him “one the one hand…on the other hand.” Since no position other than the official administration position is acceptable it is hard to have this multiple possibility attitude.

    Bush has what he needs, a guy who is willing to sacrafice his academic and professional credentials for partisan reasons. It helps the Snow “thinks it’s neato to have his name on all the money.”

  • Whenever I hear something from the Bushies, I automatically assume that the opposite is true. They are all a bunch of liars.

    I forget who said this but it is worth repeating: “Just because they say something doesn’t mean its true.”

  • Lynchi brings up an interesting, yet very distressing point. I think that another part of Bush’s “legacy” will be a long and lingering distrust by many Americans of their own government. After Watergate, I became pretty permanently skeptical, but over the span of the Bush regime, I’ve reached the point where I assume they’re lying through their teeth, no matter what the subject. Wouldn’t you think that “screwing up your country for decades to come” would qualify as a high crime or misdemeanor?

  • It doesn’t matter what they say. No one holds
    them accountable for anything. And that’s
    the way it’s going to stay.

    And my God, Bush’s ratings are heading
    back toward 50%. Half the people believe
    in this guy, after all this.

    Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless.

  • Isn’t it fantastic, they can’t lose. The more they destroy the government, the more we don’t trust the government, the more they can pull their crap without the government nailing them for it. The more they bankrupt the treasury, the less likely it is that government can help people. Just like they want. Incompetence as a means to an end.

    I heard from a Republican just after the Katrina fiasco, “Isn’t it amazing how the government can’t get anything right?”

  • I agree. You can’t make this stuff up.

    But…

    “Sipping a latte at a Starbucks coffee shop…” must be CODE for “We were at a bar, and after knocking back twelve stiff drinks, Snow popped off with this one…”

  • I agree with hark, it`s hopeless as long as there are people who can`t seem to see through the lies we`re told on a daily basis. The MSM is just as much at fault though. I believe there are quite a few who just don`t want to think about the problems we face,but if they ever suffer enough to finally pull their heads out of their collective asses, they will be shocked at how much grief this rat bastard has brought to bare on this country.

  • Snow was “sipping a latte at Starbucks”? Sounds like something those Northeastern, Ivy League, Liberal Elites would do …

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