Rolling Stone article about Bush being the worst president ever

[yesthattom]

Worst Prez Eveah

A major historian writes in Rolling Stone magazine about how Bush will go down in history as the worst president ever. This survey of historians isn't indicating that university historians are left-leaning hippies. When also asked how far back one would have to go to find a worse president many went far enough back to include Reagan and other Republicans as a better presidents.

The value of the article, to me, is that it is an awesome list of all his mistakes.

Here's one example:

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

If you listen to The Randi Rhodes Show on the radio, she often tells people to dig back to their old IRS files and calculate the percent of their full income that went to taxes (that is: (total taxes paid that year) / (all income received that year) * 100). Pick a couple years under the Clinton tax plan and a couple years after the Bush tax plan (which un-did the Clinton plan). I assure you that you will find you paid less taxes under Clinton. It's a fun exercise that must confuse the Republicans that try it (if any of them do). The fact is that Republicans raise taxes and Democrats lower it.

How can Bush claim that he cuts taxes for everyone? If you put Bill Gates in a room with 40 homeless people, the average person in the room is a millionaire. Yet, why are 40 people in that room starving? If you average the HUGE tax cuts for the few billionaires that got cuts under the Bush plan along with the penny or two tax cut everyone else got, then the average tax cut is decent. So why aren't you happy with your bright, shiny penny?

Bush doesn't lie. He "parses". He finds a way to phrase something so that it isn't technically a lie. It is better than the double-speak in Orewell's "1984". It is the new tyranny.

Comments

[tim1965.livejournal.com]

What Randi Rhodes is asking people to do is calculate their effective tax rate.

See here for a discussion of the effective tax rate and whether it has risen or fallen since 1979: http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=397907

The marginal tax rate is the rate at which the last dollar of income is taxed. The American tax system taxes only the first X number of dollars at 5 percent, the next Y number of dollars at 10 percent, the next Z number of dollars at 15 percent, and so on up to the maximum tax rate.

As I work harder and win more income (or, the more I invest and win more yield on my investment), my additional income (the "marginal dollar") is taxed at a higher rate. This "punishes" me for working harder.

Republicans focus on the marginal tax rate because they believe the tax system is a disincentive to working harder and to investment.

Republicans never focus on structural issues in the economy (education, job "stickiness," pension vestment rules, disempowerment on the job in negotiating wages, etc.) which prevent individuals from increasing their income in the first place.

[mangosteen]

As I work harder and win more income (or, the more I invest and win more yield on my investment), my additional income (the "marginal dollar") is taxed at a higher rate. This "punishes" me for working harder.

A small change in terms. Substitute "working harder" for "having more income". I don't know about you, but I don't feel winded or tired when my mutual funds' NAVs increase.

tax burden and tax rates

[cos]

I don't know what Randi Rhodes is doing because I don't listen to her show, but if I were her, I wouldn't be asking people to just look at their income tax. I think that's a mistake. I don't know she's making that mistake, but you are.

What Republicans do when they lower the income tax is to raise all other taxes to pay for part of it. The overall tax burden on a typical person includes their property tax as well as other fees that go for things that used to be paid by government at least in part. It's somewhat harder to see, which is why claiming "I cut taxes" works so well for Republicans, but fortunately I think most voters see it now.

For example, Bush lobbied hard for No Child Left Behind, but then (in cooperation with his legislature) failed to fund its demands, leaving it all to the states, which passed it on to municipalities, which passed it on to property tax payers. Bush raised property taxes by a large amount, but because he did it indirectly, he can pretend he didn't. But this increases the tax burden on a lot more people than it decreases it on.

It's not an invariant that the marginal tax rate is a disincentive to working harder. President Kennedy, a Democrat, slashed the upper tax brackets because they were too high, and they really were a strong disincentive. But when we get to the upper brackets being in the 30's, no, sorry, that argument just doesn't cut it. Currently, they're far too low to pay for government, and also too low to be a significant disincentive. The consequences of marginal tax rates being too low to pay for government is increased tax burden for the middle class, which shrinks the middle class, reduces consumer spending, suppresses entrepenuerialism, and throws friction all over the economy.

It's a balancing act with tradeoffs: marginal tax rates too high = too much disincentive to earn; marginal tax rates too low = everyone else has to pay too much. You can't win this balancing act by constantly cutting the income tax until all the rates are 0% and we pay for government entirely through other taxes and fees. In Kennedy's time, we had the balance way off in one direction, and he shifted accordingly. Reagan went a little too far the other way, but realized his mistake and corrected. Clinton found the sweet spot. Now, with Bush, we've veered precipitously to the opposite extreme from what we had in Kennedy's time. And on this side, smaller changes are proportionally more damaging.

(If you're a capital-L Libertarian, then you believe government shouldn't do the vast majority of what most people think it should do, and hence you don't think we need much of this tax revenue to pay for it. But that's an entirely different argument that you'll have to win on its own merits. The fact is, currently, most people do want government to do more than current income taxes can sensibly support.)

Re: tax burden and tax rates

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I believe that one of the core (not broadly stated to the mass media, but quite possibly touted in private fundraisers) goals of the Bush administration has been to shift power from the Federal Gov't to State Gov'ts, by shifting the power of the purse. Until FDR, your state taxes had a larger financial impact on you than your federal taxes did. By actively bounding the limits of the goals and powers of the federal government, Bush is attempting to recreate that era.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

They also never focus on the fact that people that make more money consume more resources and therefore should pay MORE taxes the more they make. For example, a person that makes a million a year probably has 100 employees... all of which required schooling, roads to travel to work. Plus, the company consumes other resources.

[tim1965.livejournal.com]

They also never focus on the fact that the cost of groceries, housing, clothing and so on for a person making $35,000 a year takes up almost all their income. A wealthy person consumes the same amount of groceries, housing, clothing, etc.

But the "marginal" cost for the poorer individual to meet his or her basic needs is far, far, FAR higher than it is for the wealthy individual. Which is why a strongly progressive tax system helps.

But Republicans don't want to admit that.

[etler.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of this article from a couple years ago:

http://hnn.us/articles/5019.html

The most interesting part I thought was the comparison to Harding, arguably our worst President ever:

HARDING: “Oil, money and politics again combine in ways not flattering to the integrity of the office. Both men also have a tendency to mangle the English language yet get their points across to ordinary Americans. [Yet] the comparison does Harding something of a disservice.”

Ouch.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I don't think Bush is quite the worst (though he is the worst in any of our lifetimes) but he's clearly worse than Harding. When Harding allowed his oil cronies to rip off the country for zillions, it didn't cost thousands of lives or America's reputation aborad. I commented on this articsl at Reddit; I'll copy that here for anyone who cares:

Worst? John Adams. Throwing all your opposition newpaper editors in jail is something W only dreams about.

The most recent president you can plausibly claim was worse than W? Woodrow Wilson. Personally, I wouldn't rate Wilson all that low, but with his extreme racism, getting us into a war we didn't need (unlike WW2 and Korea), and his arguably misguded focus on decolonialization in a way that divided the country, you can make the case.

I don't think you can make the case for Harding or Nixon, because Bush combines the faults of both of them. Hoover was mediocre when greatness was needed, but his times weren't his fault.

Others you could argue for are Andrew Johnson and Buchanan, as mentioned in the article, and also Jackson and Taft, depending on your perspective. A lot of 1829-1893 presidents were very bad. You could even make a case for Lincoln, though he'd be on the short list for best, in my opinion.

With Wilson being the last plausible candidate, that means nobody younger than 109 can have voted for or against anyone who turned out to be worse than W.

Nixon

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

Two things ruin Nixon: Vietnam and Watergate. The latter was all him; the former a whole bunch of things were inherited. He was also dealing with social upheaval that I don't think anyone understood (and still don't--most of our current political discourse is defined by people from the 60s playing out their parts).

Nixon still did many good things (China, the EPA, national speed limit) and on lots of things I've heard about he took views that would be labeled "liberal" by conservatives today. Of course, Nixon will always be defined by his scandal. Just like Clinton (who I think time will show was one of the best presidents, at least of the 20th century) will be defined by his scandal. Of course I think Watergate was more substantive.

So even Nixon isn't as bad as Bush.

[cos]

The question about Wilson is, did he leave the country and the world as much worse off compared to how they were when he started, as other presidents?

John Adams - Alien & Sedition and the jailing of newspaper editors was at least out in the open. And the lasting damage was small compared to Bush's attacks on civil liberties, which are structural and may be very hard to fix. Not to mention that with Bush, we usually only discover the big things years later through leaks. Who knows what else he's hiding. Overall, creating the fabled surveillance state for real seems much more dangerous than what Adams did.

And even if you disagree with that... Adams was a success in some facets of the presidency. Bush rivals our past worst presidents in every single field. So even if he doesn't quite match up to the worst of them, it's hard to imagine calling any of them "worse" overall.

Judging by the results they left the country with, only Buchanan has a claim. But in Buchanan's case, he dealt ineffectively with an already very bad situation. It wasn't all his fault.

[qnetter]

I would find Randi Rhodes a lot easier to respect if she didn't keep coming back to "male whore" as being the salient fact in the 'Jeff Gannon' story, or "homoerotic" as an appropriate characterization of the Abu Ghraib photos...

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I have a real problem with Randi Rhodes, too. I'm sure she's only 10% as offensive as Michael Savage (for example), but it somehow always makes me sadder to be angered by someone on "my side". On the other hand, I love Ed Schultz.

[qnetter]

I also wish some of these folks would learn to separate hot buttons from actual problems -- for instance, in Schultz' case, the fact that gas prices are high (in my opinion, a good thing, and I hope they'll go higher and higher, with offsetting payments for poor people, gas for hybrids, etc.) from the actual problem (that the rise is serving no useful purpose other than excess profits). Or, in Thom Hartman's case, I wish he didn't sound so much like an 1880s Klansman on the subject of immigration.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Oh, no kidding. But that's very much a problem across the board with talk radio.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Considering how they spend, they'd better be raising taxes!

[burritob.livejournal.com]

If you put Bill Gates in a room with 40 homeless people, the average person in the room is a millionaire.

Actually, it would be a lot more than that. Going by the entirely scientific Bill Gates Net Worth (http://evan.snew.com/ecgi/bgnw.cgi) page, he's currently worth over $27B - even if we round this down to twenty billion and change, it means that Bill could be in a room with twenty thousand other people and they'd still average out as millionaires!

I do love the example, though - it makes a fantastic soundbite.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Great icon, btw!

[cos]

Oh, this does open up possibilities!
"If you put Bill Gates in a gymnasium with all the homeless people in Brooklyn ..."