There’s been a remarkable flow of emperor’s-new-clothes-type snapshots of the Bush administration from Ron Suskind’s book based on former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s White House recollections. Of all of them, one strikes me as especially outrageous — more so than the charge that Bush entered office intending to oust Saddam (we pretty much knew that already, didn’t we?): Dick Cheney’s dismissal of O’Neill’s concern over his administration’s surplus-squandering, budget-busting, deficit-ballooning, generation-betraying tax cuts.
When O’Neill raised the issue after the 2002 elections, the book says, Cheney told him,
“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”
Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. Matter how, exactly? Reagan proved that you can win re-election despite running up huge deficits — and I suppose what Cheney is saying here is that that is all that matters to him. We can run a huge deficit and still win re-election, so who cares?
That makes a certain hardball sense. But a little voice in the back of our heads nags us with other pieces of history: like the fact that Reagan eventually came to see that bankrupting the government was not a good idea, and both he and his successor — our current president’s father — agreed to tax increases that laid the foundation for the booming, job-creating, surplus-endowing economy of the ’90s.
And then there is the little matter of the impact of deficits beyond the election. I suppose I should not be surprised that our most boardroom-brained, most corporate presidential administration should specialize in the sort of short-term thinking that has plagued so many American businesses. But sooner or later the national debt will come home to roost, engulfing us in runaway inflation, painful tax increases, decimation of services or some miserable combination of these calamities. If the late ’90s was an era of ostrich-like wishful thinking on the part of stock-market speculators who couldn’t imagine the good times ever ending, Bush, Cheney and company are recapitulating the same mentality today — except, instead of playing fast and loose with investors’ money, they’re doing it with the entire U.S. economy.
Deficits don’t matter. Up to a point, sure. But by any measure, we are way past that point. “We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations,” Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address. But his economic policy could fairly be called “leave every child behind.”
That’s the awful, eerie poignance of “Child’s Play,” the winning entrant in MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest. May every American voter watch it, and weep.
CORRECTION: Whoops, the spot’s name is “Child’s Pay.” An actual clever title, not the cliche my eyes mistook.
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