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Title: FRANKLIN DELANO BUSH
Source:
Cato Institute
URL Source: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5071
Published: Sep 29, 2005
Author: David Boaz
Post Date: 2005-09-29 22:14:28 by Uncle Bill
Keywords: FRANKLIN, DELANO, BUSH
Views: 63
Comments: 10
Franklin Delano Bush Cato Institute It wasn’t a fireside chat on the radio. No, it was different. President Bush stood in front of a church and addressed the nation by television. But otherwise, we’re back in the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his big-spending, big-government New Deal. Except the New New Deal costs a lot more. Franklin Delano Bush promised a gigantic federal relief effort--one that would go far beyond the traditional idea of disaster relief. He didn’t just promise to clean up debris, or provide temporary housing, or even rebuild New Orleans and coastal Mississippi. He promised that federal taxpayers would pay for the education of displaced children in both public and private schools. And that Medicaid would pay for health care for evacuees. And that taxpayers would give displaced workers cash grants of $5,000 each. Sweeping streets of debris is one thing. Sweeping promises are another. Bush promised that rebuilt communities “must be even better and stronger than before the storm.” Oh, and he promised to cure poverty, inequality, and racism along the Gulf Coast. The president didn’t tell us what all this would cost, but experts have been suggesting a figure of $200 billion. That would be about twice what American taxpayers spent (adjusted for inflation) on the Marshall Plan to rebuild all of Western Europe after the devastation of World War II. As Stephen Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal, with $200 billion you could give each of the 500,000 evacuated families $400,000. That would surely be the largest cash transfer program in history. And it raises the question: What’s the federal government going to do that costs $400,000 per family? Bush’s speech came just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana and Mississippi, revealing the incompetence of federal, state, and local governments. Clearly no serious thought has been given to what ought to be done for the future. Have President Bush and his advisers even considered whether it makes sense to rebuild a city below sea level on a hurricane path? Maybe New Orleans should return to being the “Crescent City,” so named because it originally sat on a narrow crescent of high land on the bank of the Mississippi River. Only 51 percent of Americans think it makes sense to rebuild New Orleans, even without asking them if they’d be willing to pay for it. Don’t expect them to be asked, either. Because the politicians know that when they’re given a chance to vote, Americans don’t like big government. Just look at the last few elections: Oregon’s liberal electorate twice voted to reject a proposed tax increase, thereby instructing the legislature to cut spending. Alabama voters rejected Gov. Bob Riley’s $1.2 billion tax hike by a 2-to-1 margin. Voters in Virginia turned down proposed tax increases for new roads. California voters tossed out big-spending Gov. Gray Davis, and 62 percent of them voted for candidates who promised not to raise taxes to close the state’s deficit. In a recent poll, 64 percent of voters said that they prefer smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes, while only 22 percent would rather see a more active government with more services and higher taxes. Federal taxpayers never get a chance to vote on taxes and spending. If they did, we might see a resounding rejection of President Bush’s massive increase in the federal budget. Voters know that politicians tend to spend money to get votes, not to solve problems. Consider that Congress passed a $51.8 billion Katrina relief bill on the very day the Associated Press released a study of where the $5 billion small-business relief money after 9/11 went. It found that the funds went to a South Dakota country radio station, a Virgin Islands perfume shop, a Utah drug boutique, and more than 100 Dunkin' Donuts and Subway shops--"companies far removed from the devastation." Fewer than 11 percent of the loans went to companies in New York and Washington. Bush and the new Republican Party are turning their backs on Americans who want smaller government. They’re delivering big-government conservatism across the board. But we already have a big-government party. The voters deserve a debate over the size and power of government. They deserve a debate right now on whether it is the responsibility of people in New York and Illinois and Colorado to pay for the education, health care, housing, and business investments of people in Louisiana and Mississippi. The following was written November 1, 1999:
by David Boaz
September 29, 2005 
David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and coeditor of the Cato Handbook on Policy.
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#2. To: Uncle Bill (#0)
http://www.whitehouse.go v/ president/gwbbio.html "Bush served for 6 years as the 46th Governor of the State of Texas, where he earned a reputation for bipartisanship and as a compassionate conservative who shaped public policy based on the principles of limited government"... "COMPASSIONATE" SOCIALISM: The Ideology of George W. Bush The Boston Globe IT IS 1965. You have just acquired a time machine. Eager to try it out, you set the controls to take you 40 years into the future. As the machine whirs its way through the fourth dimension, you find yourself thinking (of all things!) about politics. In the America receding behind you, the president is Lyndon Johnson. The landslide winner of last year's election, he is forging ahead with his "War on Poverty" and "Great Society," spending billions of taxpayer dollars and creating vast new entitlement programs. His fellow Democrats control Congress and easily brush aside GOP complaints about creeping socialism and reckless federal spending. The contrast between LBJ and Barry Goldwater, the Republican he defeated in November, could hardly be greater. A fiscal conservative, Goldwater had called for sharply reducing the federal government. He and his supporters wanted to end farm subsidies, privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority, and balance the federal budget. "Our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in," a Goldwater surrogate, former actor Ronald Reagan, had said in a fiery endorsement speech. "We haven't balanced our budget in 28 out of the last 34 years." The time machine slows to a halt. You climb out and set off to explore 2005. Many things have changed, you discover. The Cold War is over. Televisions broadcast in color. Motorists pump their own gas. The secretary of state is black — and a woman! But one thing that seems familiar is budgetary politics. One political party is still running the show in Washington and still spending as mindlessly as ever. The budget is now hundreds of billions of dollars in the red, and the national debt has soared to more than $7 trillion — well over $1.5 trillion of it added during the current presidential administration. The incumbent in the White House, a Texan named Bush, burns through money even more extravagantly than the Texan named Johnson you left behind in 1964. "Excluding military and homeland security," the American Conservative Union notes in a statement, "American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression." In the wake of two hurricanes in the South, Bush and Congress plan to spend as much as $200 billion for relief and reconstruction. When Bush is asked at a press conference, "Who is going to have to pay for this recovery? And what's it going to do to the national debt?" he answers blithely: "It's going to cost whatever it costs." Fiscal conservatives are distressed by such irresponsibility. But when they propose to balance the whopping hurricane spending by cutting unnecessary outlays elsewhere, they are promptly slapped down. The conservatives are aghast. What about that bloated hog of a highway bill, they ask — the one with more than 6,300 porkbarrel "earmarks" adding up to $24 billion? Couldn't some of those be repealed? Or the new Medicare drug benefit, the one projected to cost $1.2 trillion over the next decade? How about delaying it for a year? From everywhere come suggestions of items to eliminate or reduce: Corporate welfare. Public financing of presidential campaigns. Amtrak. The National Endowment for the Arts. Agribusiness subsidies. Congressional pay raises. From an automotive museum in Ohio to bicycle paths in Massachusetts, there is no shortage of budgetary blubber that could be eliminated. But Bush, who has never vetoed a single bill, shows no interest in fiscal self-control. And neither does the leadership in Congress, a crew of wastrels next to whom the LBJ Democrats of 40 years ago were penny-pinching skinflints. Suddenly, with a start, you realize something astonishing: Bush is actually a Republican. The House and Senate are controlled by Republicans. They walk and talk and spend like old-time Democrats, but in fact they belong to the GOP. Somewhere along the way, the heirs of Goldwater and Reagan became clones of Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. The party of fiscal sobriety turned into a gang of reckless big spenders. You wonder: Is this profligacy inevitable when either party controls all the levers of power? Is the body politic no healthier under a Republican monopoly than it was during all the years of Democratic monopoly? If so, Lord Acton was right: Unchecked and unbalanced, power inevitably corrupts. Shaking your head sadly, you return to the time machine and set the controls for 1965.
“Small government conservatives have revolted against President Bush and the Republican leadership in the Senate and House, their goal, with hurricane recovery costs soaring, is what it’s always been: to hold down and restrain the growth of government. It is an impossible dream or close to impossible.” “Big-government conservatives are favorably disposed toward what neoconservative Irving Kristol has called a ‘conservative welfare state.’ Such a disposition puts them on the wrong side of history, and will, if their vision is followed, put America smack in the path of a fiscal storm that will make the one-time relief spending on this year’s hurricanes look like a summer breeze."
Bush's Spending Lie - It's one thing to lie to Democrats, another to lie to your comrades "If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined."
When he isn't spewing lies or promoting officials who write a memo advocating systematic torture, he's butchering the English language. georgebushmisunderestimated
#9. To: robin, OKCSubmariner (#8)
If you can, get this out to as many people/organizations as you can.
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#5. To: christine, robin (#2)
George W. Bush Biography - White House Website:
Big government deja vu all over again
Jeff Jacoby
September 29 2005
Source
#6. To: robin, christine (#5)
Fred Barnes - editor of the Weekly Standard, Sept. 2005.
Fred Barnes - editor of the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, 2003.
#7. To: robin, christine (#6)
George W. Bush - Meet The Press.
#8. To: Uncle Bill (#7)
"If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined." George W. Bush - Meet The Press.
Replies to Comment # 8.
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