E-mail a friendBruce Bartlett
original airdate April 17, 2007
Economist Bruce Bartlett was an official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and helped President George W. Bush craft his early tax cuts. He writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column and for such popular Web sites as RealClearPolitics.com. Ranked number nine on International Economy magazine's list of the most important think tank scholars in the U.S., Bartlett is also a prolific author. His new book, Wrong on Race, is an exposé of the racial roots of the Democratic Party.
Bruce Bartlett
Tavis: Bruce Bartlett is a syndicated columnist and author who served as an economic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and later a deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury Department under the first President Bush. His most recent book is called "Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." He joins us tonight from Washington. Mr. Bartlett, nice to have you on the program.
Bruce Bartlett: Happy to be here.
Tavis: Did George W. Bush do all of that?
Bartlett: (Laughs) Bankrupt America? Yeah, I think we've had something like a $20 trillion increase in the national debt under this president's watch and I think one of these days - I don't know when - but one of these days, the chickens are gonna come home to roost.
Tavis: So what happened? As I recall, when he ran for office the first time around persons like you and other conservatives rallied around this guy as the guy you wanted in the White House. And now you're calling him, six years later, an imposter?
Bartlett: Well, I think you're entitled to judge candidates on the basis of what they say they're going to do and then judge them later on the basis of what they actually do. I don't think there were very many people who anticipated that he would turn out to be the kind of potential that he is.
Tavis: So tell me what you think happened where economic policy is concerned, since you thought, at least, you were backing the right horse. What happened?
Bartlett: Well, obviously 9/11 changed a lot of things but I think the main thing is that it appears now in retrospect that this president didn't really have any clear economic plan. That a lot of things were done on an ad-hoc basis or based solely on political considerations without much thought as to how all the pieces fit together, and I think that led to a lot of mistakes.
Tavis: With all due respect to the president, you slid right past 9/11 and clearly, I'd be the last person on planet Earth defending George W. Bush and his economic policies, or lack thereof. But to the president's credit, you can't just slide past 9/11. I wonder whether or not you're being a little bit too harsh on the president given, again, your perspective on these fiscal matters. Any president would have had a difficult time trying to keep the country on track when something like 9/11 happens out of the blue.
Bartlett: Well obviously, that's the case. But one wonders about the linkage to the Iraq war, and things of that sort. We still don't really know whether there was any connection between Iraq and 9/11. And when I said 9/11, I meant that as shorthand for all of the terror-related issues that we've had to deal with for the last seven years.
Tavis: Give me some concrete examples of what the president - just two or three examples of what the president has done on fiscal policy, or not done, as it were, that has fiscal conservatives like yourself so upset with him, specifically?
Bartlett: Well, the first thing that bothered me a lot, and the reason I actually wrote the book, was because of the Medicare drug benefit which I thought was really a bad policy for the simple reason that we couldn't afford it. We didn't have - the Medicare system was already broken, and to add an enormous new entitlement on top of it without any way of funding it I thought was irresponsible.
And secondly, I think a lot of the tax cuts were not well designed to help with economic growth, and were really just the tax equivalent of pork barrel spending - just special deals for special groups. And as a consequence, I don't think we've really gotten the benefits - the economic benefits - of these tax cuts the way we would have if they had been more targeted, if they'd been made permanent in the first place instead of expiring and things of that sort.
Tavis: Talk to me more specifically - educate me here about your point of view and the view of others where these tax cuts are concerned. Because I ask that against the backdrop of the fact that I suspect most Americans - certainly those on the left - are a bit taken aback when they hear a conservative complaining about a tax cut. I can clearly her Democrats and liberals complaining about a tax cut, but why are conservatives complaining about tax cuts?
Bartlett: Well, for one thing, they're all expiring.
Tavis: (Laughs) Now, that makes sense to me. I get that part.
Bartlett: (Laughs) Okay. Well, as an economist, you look at tax cuts, different kinds of tax cuts; they have different effects on the economy. Some have a very positive effect; some have virtually no effects at all. Some might have negative effects. And I think if you look at the whole menu of all the different kinds of tax cuts that this president enacted, only some of them were really very helpful to economic growth, and a lot of the others weren't.
They were just revenue that was lost to no purpose of any kind whatsoever. And that's what I was getting at when I think that there wasn't really a logic or a plan in place at the beginning to tell us exactly what we should have been doing. We could have completely reformed the tax system if we'd wanted to. We could have had a flat-rate tax or any number of other things that - there were opportunities lost, in my opinion.
Tavis: Tell me more specifically how you think he betrayed - as the book's subtitle suggests - the Reagan legacy on these matters.
Bartlett: Well, the main thing is that he himself - he calls himself a big government conservative, and I think that that's just a contradiction in terms. Ronald Reagan was a small government conservative. I think virtually all conservatives are small government conservatives, and I think that in many ways, this president is one of the biggest government presidents we've had in a long time.
Tavis: But Mr. Bartlett, again, back to six years ago - when he ran and you all embraced him, he told you he was a different kind of conservative. He coined the phrase "compassionate conservative." What did you take that to mean?
Bartlett: Oh, in 2000 I thought that was just election year rhetoric. I didn't think it meant anything. I learned the hard way, as a lot of us did, that he really meant it when he talked about compassionate conservatism, but at the time I thought it was just throw-away rhetoric that all candidates use on the campaign trail to try to win votes.
Tavis: That sounds, respectfully, a bit naive to me. If a guy is telling you up front, "I'm a different kind of conservative, I have a certain level of compassion, I believe there's a role that government ought to play, government can't do everything, government ought to play a role in our lives," maybe it's not that he's an imposter - maybe you just misread the entire situation.
Bartlett: Well, that's quite possible. I plead guilty, but an awful lot of other people were just as taken down the wrong path. I didn't know that much about George Bush except that he was the son of the former president and he had been a middlingly successful governor of Texas. We've all learned a great deal about this man that we know today that we didn't know in 2000.
Tavis: You've drawn some clear distinctions between George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Since you worked for his father - that is to say, the senior Bush - how does he compare in contrast with his father on these policies?
Bartlett: Well, I'll tell you, if I didn't know with a certainly that they were related, I wouldn't think that they were. As we recall, what got the father in trouble politically was that he had a big budget deal in 1990 that he raised taxes to put together, and a lot of budget experts think that that was one of the most important budget deals in American history.
This president obviously doesn't care one whit about the fiscal situation, doesn't worry at all about deficits or debt. His father did, and his father paid a very heavy political price for it. And so I really think that there's just almost nothing between the two of them in terms of fiscal policy.
Tavis: Finally - and respectfully; you're the expert here, not me - but wasn't the supply-side economics of the Reagan era, in retrospect, a bit overrated anyway?
Bartlett: No, I don't think so. I think the problem is that you had a good idea, it was appropriate for a certain time and place and a certain set of circumstances, and it's been carried too far. We have a completely different economic situation, a completely different fiscal and tax situation, and I think people are still using rhetoric that was appropriate at one time for a situation in which it is no longer appropriate.
Tavis: Got about 20 seconds here. Anything the president can do at this point over the next two years to make Bruce Bartlett happy?
Bartlett: No, I don't really think so. I think we're on automatic pilot. Very few administrations ever do much of anything their last year and a half in office. I think the best thing we can hope for is a new president who will take us in a different direction.
Tavis: The new book by - the latest book by Bruce Bartlett is "Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." Mr. Bartlett, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Bartlett: Thank you.
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