Ben Stein Slams Tax Cuts, Tea Partiers, Bush, and Obama as ‘Careless,’ But Praises Clinton

NewsBusters.org ^ | August 1, 2011 | Brad Wilmouth

[sinanju]

"STEIN: This comes to mind because of the budget, taxes, debt ceiling crisis the nation is going through. What we are seeing is a stupendous pile-up of immensely careless people who have been heading for trouble for more than a decade now. There's no doubt that Bill Clinton for all of his issues left the federal budget on a sound financial footing. It was undone by the bursting of the Internet bubble, the two wars following 9/11, but mostly because of the folly of supply side economics, which falsely assured Americans that they could have their cake and it a eat it, too. That large tax cuts would yield higher government revenue. There never was any convincing data to back it up, and there’s also supply side tax cuts were immense government deficits under Bush 43.

There was also another problem, an inflexible belief by some on the GOP side that low taxes were an American birthright. They're not. We're not immune to arithmetic. If we spend a lot, we have to tax a lot. Then came Mr. Obama's carelessness. His wild raise in the federal expenditure so that what had seemed like huge deficits under Bush 43 suddenly seemed modest. And then came the Tea Partiers who insisted on the basically impossible, an immediate cut in federal spending, large enough to balance the budget without tax increases. In this age of Medicare and Medicaid, two wars, massive federal debt, interest payments, staggering Social Security obligations, that was simply impossible..."

[Rockingham]

Although pro-free market, economist Herb Stein had a strong anti-doctrinaire and pragmatic streak that led to him being described as “a liberal’s conservative and a conservative’s liberal.” Ben Stein seems to have taken up a similar niche.

[trickamsterdam]

What he and a lot of people don't understand is that what Bush did is not supply-side. It really wasn't growth centered.

$400 per child is just a Dem-type spending program to get people to vote for you. Bush's economic policy was perfectly miserable; I can't stand when people defend it just because he was an R.

If you look at the Paul Ryan plan, he understands supply side. Not that it could pass. Also, they sold it as a deficit reduction plan, not a jobs plan, and that was a mistake as well (because it adds too much debt).