ClydeR
03-24-2009, 02:46 PM
Frontline (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/) will air a report tonight on PBS that tries to blame the current fiscal mess on George W. Bush, but we all know the blame should be placed at the feet of Barack Obama.
There is a succinct history lesson on how the Republican “starve the beast” economic philosophy — if you keep taxes low, government spending will automatically be kept low for lack of money — ran off the rails. And then, the program says, Mr. Bush took things a step further by cutting taxes while starting a war.
“We borrowed money from China to give tax cuts to the best-off people in our society and leave our kids paying the bill for a war that we chose to fight,” says Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning research group. “That was really unprecedented.”
Perhaps Mr. Bush’s main economic failure, based on the evidence here, was that he did not use the attacks of 9/11 to call on Americans to sacrifice, as other wartime presidents had. Instead he expanded spending — on the Iraq war, on prescriptions for the aging — without a template of how to pay for it.
More... (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/arts/television/24ten.html)
I encourage all of you not to watch Frontline on PBS tonight. I will watch it, of course, but only so that I can keep a record of all the inaccuracies.
There is a succinct history lesson on how the Republican “starve the beast” economic philosophy — if you keep taxes low, government spending will automatically be kept low for lack of money — ran off the rails. And then, the program says, Mr. Bush took things a step further by cutting taxes while starting a war.
“We borrowed money from China to give tax cuts to the best-off people in our society and leave our kids paying the bill for a war that we chose to fight,” says Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning research group. “That was really unprecedented.”
Perhaps Mr. Bush’s main economic failure, based on the evidence here, was that he did not use the attacks of 9/11 to call on Americans to sacrifice, as other wartime presidents had. Instead he expanded spending — on the Iraq war, on prescriptions for the aging — without a template of how to pay for it.
More... (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/arts/television/24ten.html)
I encourage all of you not to watch Frontline on PBS tonight. I will watch it, of course, but only so that I can keep a record of all the inaccuracies.