Bush to nation: The buck stops somewhere in the future

October 5, 2007

By one count, the president has publicly vowed to “solve problems, not pass them on to future presidents and future generations” almost 250 times. The AP’s Jennifer Loven found quite a few examples of Bush actually choosing to do the opposite. Excerpts from her lengthy list:

* The economy is relatively sound and deficits are falling after peaking in 2004. But an entire presidency of red ink has ballooned the overall federal debt from $5.7 trillion when Bush became president to $8.9 trillion now. The Iraq war, including providing medical care and disability benefits to veterans, as well as expensive new programs like a Medicare prescription drug benefit threaten to drive deficits back up. Economists fear growing odds of a recession.

* The nation’s health care spending, public and private, totaled $1.5 trillion when Bush took office. By the time he leaves, it is expected to be $2.6 trillion — a 75 percent increase. Meanwhile, the nation’s number of uninsured has swelled, from 14 percent of the population in 2001 to 16 percent last year, or a total of 47 million people.

* Now in its fifth year, the Iraq war has claimed the lives of more than 3,800 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians, wounded over 28,000 U.S. military personnel, and cost nearly half a trillion dollars. Even if combat ends, Bush says the United States will need to provide military, economic and political support beyond his presidency and have “an enduring relationship” with Iraq.

Indeed, it’s quite an indictment. Since Bush took office, the terrorist threat has gotten worse, not better. Energy prices have gotten worse, and are poised to continue in this direction. Fiscal challenges facing Social Security and Medicare have been ignored. The shortcomings of the nation’s immigration system will not be addressed until there’s a new president.

Matthew Dowd, the chief campaign strategist for Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign said, “We’re in a worse place than we were in 1999.” What was he referring to? Apparently, everything.

Stephen J. Wayne, a Georgetown University presidential scholar, “It’s hard to find something he has done that really has improved the situation a great deal.” That’s a generous way of putting it. Except for better relations with the government of Afghanistan, I can’t think of a single area of foreign or domestic policy in which the United States is better off now than it was in January 2001.

Bush isn’t just passing on some problems onto “future presidents and future generations”; he’s passing on every problem.

And just as an aside, I think the AP’s Jennifer Loven deserves some serious kudos for writing a piece like this. These kinds of big-picture, Bush-is-screwing-everything-up-royally pieces are exceedingly rare in traditional news outlets, and Loven did a terrific job with this.

Indeed, she has a bit of a history delivering these kinds of quality news-analysis pieces. In March 2006, Loven had a great item explaining that when Bush “starts a sentence with ‘some say’ or offers up what ‘some in Washington’ believe,” he’s almost always playing a deceptive straw-man game. In May, Loven had another gem in which she noted that the president has a habit of fabricating popular poll support for his ideas.

And today, she’s done it again. I hope she isn’t fired.

Kudos are deserved here.

When I was a grad student about eight years ago, my school brought in the right-wing “thinker” Charles Murray to speak. When railing against “the underclass,” Murray made the argument that its members were exclusively “present-focused”: they thought only about the here and now, undermining their own ability to fare better in the future as a result of diligent effort in school, saving money, and so forth.

Like so many of his critiques, the charge is more applicable to obscenely rich white Republicans in $3,000 suits than to desperately poor African-American kids with do-rags. Bush has paid for war and tax cuts by borrowing money from our economic rivals, undercutting both our long-term economic stability and our ability to call these bad international actors on their repellent actions. He’s done nothing to attack the root causes of terror; he’s done less to address the existential threat of environmental transformation.

Even in the realm of economic competitiveness–a field you’d think Republicans would emphasize–this administration has kneecapped our future prospects by cutting investment in scientific research and innovation. It has done nothing to broaden educational access and raise quality, as even George Will alluded to yesterday.

The next president will face the most serious set of challenges to America’s place in the world–indeed, to the stability and prosperity of the world–since FDR. That’s another reason to desperately wish it Al Gore, the one man whom I’d trust to take on those challenges, would run and win. (And I write this as someone who seriously disliked Gore in 2000.) In his absence, I look to the candidate who’s next most likely to transcend Washington orthodoxy and think in bold new ways about these challenges, drawing all Americans together to craft responses. That’s Obama.

  • Steve–

    I have one quibble with what your wrote. You said “Fiscal challenges facing Social Security and Medicare have been ignored.” Bush didn’t ignore Social Security. He spent the better part of 2005 trying to dismantle it. Progressives may dispute Bush’s proposed solution to the (non-existent) Social Security crisis. But, ignore it he did not.

    As for the real looming crisis facing Medicare (which I submit is tied into the broader debate concerning healthcare), you are correct–it has been ignored. Worse, Bush exacerbated the problem by strong-arming through Part D (drug benefits) using demonstrably false budgetary projections.

  • “Fiscal challenges facing Social Security and Medicare have been ignored.”

    And what have previous administrations done? What the hell has Congress done?

  • I don’t know. Did I just walk away from the article feeling Sorry for the President? That’s how she laid it out. This isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, and coming from the AP it’s just about right. The other thing. The first satatement about the ballooning deficit. Read that closely. Are those correct figures. Excuse my ignorance but didn’t Bush inherit a Surplus?

  • George W. Bush is going to be indicted by the bar of history as the WORST president EVER.

  • Well, let’s see, JRS Jr, EVERYTIME the Congress tries to put forth legislation, the obstructionist RepigliCONS filibuster, to the tune of $ times more than any other Congress in history. So, ask not what your Congress has done, ask what you can do to stop the Repigs in Congress from using “cheap procedural maneuvers” (sound familiar???) to block the People’s work from being done. After all, it’s only fair to allow an ‘Up or down” vote, right?

  • DA:

    Bush did indeed inherit an annual budget surplus. But he also inherited a large national debt, run up significantly during the administrations of Reagan and Bush the Elder. Annual budget surpluses reduce the accumulated debt. Budget deficits increase it. The article is referring to the accumulated federal debt, which Bush will have nearly doubled by the time his term ends.

  • Fiscal challenges facing Social Security and Medicare have been ignored.

    Do not adopt Republican framing. If the economy grows at a rate lower than it has historically, Social Security will continue to be able to pay for itself. Even if the economy grows at the low rate predicted by the CBO, Social Security shortfalls will be a drop in the bucket compared to Medicare. Social Security is not an issue, Medicare is.

  • When the blame game begins and they start passing the buck up the chain of command it eventually hits a stone wall located just outside the Oval Office and gets diverted in another direction. So far – this has worked out very well for them.

  • Fiscal challenges facing Social Security and Medicare have been ignored.

    For a real eye-opener, just look at the chart on the cover of “The Nation’s Long-Term
    Fiscal Outlook: August Update” from GAO. Lede paragraph:

    GAO’s updated long-term simulations illustrate that despite some
    improvement in the annual deficit estimate for this fiscal year, the longterm
    fiscal outlook remains essentially the same and is clearly
    unsustainable—ever-larger deficits lead to a federal debt burden that
    ultimately spirals out of control.

    http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071261r.pdf

  • Same song different note. Basically a variation on a theme for Dubya. For him it is everyone else’s fault and up to others to fix what went wrong.

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