Posted on 10/11/2005 7:09:03 PM PDT by Conservative Firster
Though widely viewed as an arch conservative in the major media, Bruce Bartlett increasingly finds himself alienated from the president of his party. Bush's policies, he warns, have been anything but conservative.
Bartlett faults Bush for moving away from free trade, adopting Keynesian economic theories, increasing government regulation and doing an extremely poor job of developing and selling conservative initiatives, such as Social Security reform. As such, George W. Bush, he says, has been a disaster for conservatism. Criticism of Bush from the right has largely been confined to fringe elements outside the mainstream of the conservative movement. Bartlett is the first from within the conservative mainstream to make the case that Bush is not "one of us" and does not deserve conservatives' support. As the next presidential election looms, Bartlett warns, a new standard bearer must be found who will correct the many errors of this administration and get America's fiscal house in order.
After September 11, America declared war on Islamic militancy that required huge new expenditures on defense. In the face of this, it was folly, says Bartlett, to introduce the Medicare drug benefit, a middle class entitlement program that, according to its own actuaries, burdens the American taxpayer with a new $18.2 trillion debt, an amount much larger even than the (once-) dreaded Social Security crisis. To pay for this vast new expansion of the welfare state, Bartlett warns, taxes can only go up—way up. Getting sufficient revenue out of our current tax system will be futile, making something like a European-style value added tax a near-certainty. It is noteworthy that Governor Bush once appointed a Texas tax reform commission that recommended a VAT, which he then supported.
On top of the Medicare drug benefit, Bush has rammed through huge expansions of federal education and agriculture programs. He has done nothing to restrain Congress's pork barrel spending and is the first president since James Garfield not to veto a single bill.
The administration's massive increases in government spending, Bartlett says, makes a sharp increase in taxes inevitable. There are many reasons to believe that a financial crisis may be brewing as a result. The Federal Reserve, for instance, is raising interest rates, which will put pressure on the stock and bond markets, and eventually prick the housing bubble, just as Fed tightening ultimately popped the stock market bubble of the late 1990's. When this happens, Washington policymakers who have been ignoring the budget deficit for years will suddenly see deficit reduction as the only way of restoring confidence. At this point, Bush will have to reverse course on taxes and spending.
Bartlett weighs in around 300 pounds. I suspect he'll never be invited to mountain bike with Bush, any time soon, either.
I don't know all the contents of this book, but with both a Republican House and Senate, I don't get why Bush had to sign everything that came across his desk without ever a veto. That I never got about Bush.
Hmmmm. Well, to be fair, I haven't paid that much attention to this 'advisory' group.
Thanks; I'll be paying attention now.
So, in short, this council will give W. cover to raise taxes, not by direct means, but by taking away breaks, yes?
I was listening to Tony Snow tonight and a caller said Bush was the character Andy Griffith played on TV. Hmm...
>>The bushbots are already in full Captain Queeg mode over all the conservatives "jumping the shark" on the Miers nomination.<<
LOL. True.
Reagan also signed a tax increase in his second term, turned and ran in the face of Islamist terrorism in Lebanon, signed the Brady bill, and kept the Department of Education after campaigning for its demise. But I still love the guy.
So he will make inevitable the victory of someone who will balance the budget.
I do also and think he was the greatest 20th cnetury President, but that doesn't stop so called "true conservatives" from using his name for their petty little books.
"The bushbots are already in full Captain Queeg mode over all the conservatives "jumping the shark" on the Miers nomination"
Captain Queeg was paranoid due to battle stress. How do the Miers supporters, or bush bots as you put it, compare to Queeg? It seems to me, the Miers opponents better fit the Queeg personality...paranoid about the Miers nomination and believing that Bush has betrayed them. Isn't that what Queeg claimed about his crew...that they were distrustful and betrayed him?
Reagan was a great President but he wasn't perfect.
Bush is a good President but he's not perfect either.
We're not going to ever have a perfect President unless Jesus himself were to take the job and he's already King of Kings so I don't see him anxious to take the pay cut.
You must have been asleep during GWB's 2000 campaign. He all but declared himself the rightful heir of Reagan.
Who would've guessed that on September 22, 2005 GWB would include RR, along with Carter and Clinton, as lacking "courage and character" thus emboldening terrorists worldwide.
Reagan was a pragmatist above all else. He was motivated by conservative ideals, but he said himself that if you're offered two-thirds of what you're after, you take it, and fight again another day. Bush is also a pragmatist, and this drives the ivory-tower snipers on the right crazy (as if they needed a reason to be crazy). I admire Reagan above every other recent president, and on those issues where he "compromised," I trusted his judgment. At the moment, I trust Bush's judgment as well.
>>>"W will not raise taxes. Period."
Read my lips... when interest rates skyrocket on a collapsing dollar, Bush will attempt to raise taxes.
The big question is, will he try to cut spending?
Hoppy
I would characterize Bush as a middle-of-the-road conservative, a "moderate," if you will...
A decent man who strives for a position that places himself into the central, silent majority, of the electorate, Bush was the ideal candidate to win the presidency and to advance the concept of being conservative to the bulk of the voting fence-sitters. But now, true conservatives, in large part thanks to Bush, have been emboldened and demand their day in the sun.
Yeah, he's right. Al Gore and John Kerry would have been so much more loyal to conservative ideals. ( /sarcasm )
Although Reagan come out in favor of the Brady bill, Clinton signed it.
If someone wants to oppose Miers for some higher principle, that's fine. But what I've observed since joining FR seven years ago is that there is a strain within conservatism which neurotically resents being a majority, and hankers for the "good old days" of the 1950s when they could howl at the moon, promote a wacked-out negative perspective on things, and represented no more than 20% of the electorate.
I don't think that much the current angst has anything to do with Miers. Let's face it...there are a lot of Bush-bashers on the right, and they've been bashing him since 1999 when he announced his candidacy. They came out in force in January of '04 to take pot shots at Bush (resulting in some of the more egregious ones being bounced from the FR fraternity because of the corrosiveness of their vitriol). What I've concluded is that all of the Bush-bashing from the "true conservatives" is essentially a front in the war for the soul of conservativism, in which the paleos- are trying to run the neo-conservatives (whose emergence on the scene resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan) out of the conservatism. The fact is, some people have a narrow definition of "conservatism" (their own), and anyone who strays from that narrow definition, really isn't a conservative. They, and their leader, most likely Pat Buchanan, want to take conservativism back to the "glory days" of where it was in the 1940s, when it couldn't get a dogcatcher elected in central Kansas. They claim Reagan is their hero, but it is Reagan who pulled together all of the people with various interests whom the "true believers" now want to drive out of the movement.
These "conservatives" are a pretty exclusive bunch, and a pretty exclusionary bunch as well. Their view of the world is fairly narrow; they are essentially pessimistic about everything; they are strident in their attitudes and obnoxious in their behavior. But, I guess, they think the glory days of conservatism were when conservatism was narrow, exclusive, strident and obnoxious.
I think what really bothers them is that George W. Bush operates, pretty much all of the time, from a set of values which are decent and honorable, and not from a rigid "conservative" ideology. What I'd like to know is when did honor and decency stop being conservative values?
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