“It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time.” – Abraham Lincoln
This year’s deficit will likely exceed $300 billion – surpassing the record $290 billion shortfall of 1992, when Bush’s father was president. (Soaring Budge Deficits Projected, by Alan Fram, AP, 1/30/03)
Twelve years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America's nuclear weapons budget has grown back to its Cold War peak.
The Bush administration's proposed 2004 budget of $6.7 billion is roughly the same, in inflation-adjusted terms, as the largest U.S. nuclear weapons budget in history. That was in 1985, during the Reagan administration's Cold War buildup.
John Fleck, Nuke Budget Soars, Albuquerque Journal, Sunday, February 9, 2003, http://www.abqjournal.com/news/831999news02-09-03.htm
"Nor does anyone know what vanquishing Saddam and then governing Iraq will cost in either dollars or lives. Lawrence Lindsey, the chief White House economic adviser, was fired after he put the bill at $100 billion to $200 billion. But William Nordhaus, the Yale economist, puts the Lindsey estimate at the low end, with the high end being $1.6 trillion over a decade. Whatever the number, the cost of the war isn't being factored at all into the budget proposal the White House will send to Congress, according to USA Today." FRANK RICH , Joe Millionaire for President, January 18, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/18/opinion/18RICH.html?ex=1043941038&ei=1&en=574014d059794810
Bush appointed Lawrence Lindsay as his chief economic adviser on January 3, 2001. On that day, the Dow stood at 10,646.15, and unemployment was 4 percent.
Lindsay bumbled along until being forced out on December 6, 2002. If you can believe Lindsay, Bush thanked him for a job well-done, saying: "You helped me with a tough election. You developed an economic plan that was needed and effective. You provided sound advice to me during very tough times. In short, you did your job with distinction and class, and I am most grateful."
Yeah, right. He helped Bush dodge his way through the Enron scandal, he helped turn a surplus into a deficit, and he said the recession was over when it was getting worse. The day Lindsay got the heave-ho, the Dow stood at 8513.51 [-2132.64, -20%], and unemployment hit 6 percent.
Amid the Christmas merriment, Lindsay's wife Sue leaned over at a White House party to thank the president for dumping her husband. "Stalin would have shot him," she joked.
James Ridgeway, Thanks, Mr. Lindsay!, January 29, 2003, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0305/ridgeway.php
“If President Bush understands his own tax proposal, he is smarter than he gets credit for, but I beg leave to doubt…. ‘The tax code is too complicated as it is,’ Bush declared during the 2000 campaign, warning that his opponent would ‘make it more complicated.’ But the mind of Al Gore never conjured up a mess like this.
…
“Bush, in a funny way, seems to be a man of ideas. He doesn’t have a lot of them himself, but hand him one and he’ll run with it, undeterred by opposition, or subsequent evidence and logic. He has the unreflective person’s immunity from irony, that great killer of intellectual passion. Ask him to reconcile his line on Iraq with his line on North Korea and he just gets irritated. Tell him he can’t be for tax simplification and offer a Rube Goldberg contraption like this [dividend plan] and he’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah – just watch me.’ Michael Kinsley, Bush Tax Complexity Maddening, 1/18/03
“Bush will propose a ‘targeted’ increase in military pay that would boost pay an average of 4.1 percent, almost a full percent higher than wage growth in the private sector. … Bush noted that the 2003 defense bill he signed in early December supports ‘the largest increase in defense spending in a generation.’” Tom Philpott, Bush rejects cap on military pay raises, 1/20/03
hits.
