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Saturday, March 15, 2003
Well...... that's different.....
I realize that George Will is a columnist and therefore he can be as partisan as he wants, but there is no excuse for rank hypocrisy. From Will's latest:
Recall efforts flourish like avocados in California. There have been 32 recall drives against California governors, including every governor since Edmund Brown in 1960. But no effort has made it to a vote. This one may, because even Davis's supporters dislike him, and because of the state's budget crisis. Its size astonishes the nation, and Californians are especially astonished because Davis said during last fall's campaign that all was well.
The deficit is at least $35 billion. So it may be about a third of the 50 states' estimated cumulative deficit, currently $90 billion or more.
The woes of the dot-com and high-tech sectors have disproportionately hurt California, and capital gains tax revenue is way down. Nevertheless, state revenue has risen 28 percent since 1998 -- which is not as fast as Davis has spent. To close the budget gap, which the state constitution requires, he will have to raise many taxes and fees and cut many programs, and every act will create potential recruits for the recall movement.
Now let's talk about Will's current favorite President:
When President Bush was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2001, U.S. stocks were valued at $14.7 trillion, according to Wilshire Associates. Last week’s value: $9.9 trillion. Total decline: $4.8 trillion. The only fair way to compare the Bush Market with other presidents’ markets is to use percentages rather than dollars. Here, too, he leads the pack. According to a study conducted for NEWSWEEK by Aronson+Johnson+Ortiz, a Philadelphia money-management firm, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has fallen more in Bush’s first two years than under any president since the modern stock market emerged. (AJO’s data go back only as far as Hoover, enough for our purposes.) During Hoover’s first two years, which included the Black Thursday crash in October 1929, the S&P fell 29 percent. Not as bad as Bush’s 33 percent. (Through last week, the decline was 36 percent.)
You can’t blame this all on Bush, of course. The market he inherited in 2001 had been inflated by the tech and telecom bubble that started popping in the spring of 2000. It was bound to fall. But he’s been in office long enough to bear at least some responsibility—you can bet he’d be taking the credit if the market were rising. He can’t blame the problem on 9-11. AJO says the S&P 500 declined at a 28 percent annual rate from Bush’s Inauguration through Sept. 10, 2001, but at less than half that rate since 9-11. However you count, the market isn’t buying his program. And in the long run, the market’s pretty savvy.
When Bush was sworn in, Uncle Sam seemed to be awash in cash. The federal budget was running big surpluses; the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected a $5.6 trillion surplus for the 2002-2011 fiscal years. Bush got his 2001 tax cut through Congress even though the only way to make the numbers work was to use 10 years of projected surpluses to support a tax cut projected to last only nine years. That’s why the cuts are scheduled to end in 2010—which, of course, they won’t. The fact that the president used this kind of “fuzzy math” to get what he wanted doesn’t exactly inspire faith in the reliability of his numbers.
More on Bush:
The Congressional Budget Office today forecast a larger-than-expected deficit of $199 billion for this fiscal year, the largest deficit since 1994 and a figure more than a third larger than the shortfall projected only five months ago.
The influential CBO projections will almost certainly complicate President Bush’s push for a dramatic new round of tax cuts, as lawmakers begin to confront a rising tide of red ink. Just two years after congressional forecasters predicted a $5.6 trillion surplus for this decade, now they do not foresee a return to surpluses until 2007. And the CBO’s latest projections would be substantially worsened by new tax cuts and a war with Iraq, neither of which are included in the new numbers.
The difference, of course, is that the California state Constitution mandates that the California budget be balanced. The US budget can be maintained in deficit in perpetuity, meaning that Bush can continue spending like a drunken Texan, while saddling our grandkids with the bill. By the time the bill comes due, George W. Bush will be wrangling pretzels down at his Crawford "ranch" while drinking himself into a well-deserved oblivion.
Meanwhile, Will posits that:
Republicans, who lost every statewide race last November, might pay a steep price for the fun of dumping Davis. President Bush's chances of carrying California in November 2004, and Republicans' chances of defeating the hyper-liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer, might be better if Californians nurture their anti-Davis grievances for two full years.
[snip...]
Winning reelection by just 47 percent to 42 percent over an opponent running his first campaign and running it badly, Davis got 1.4 million fewer votes than in 1998. His job approval rating has plummeted to 27 percent. But although he has governed both unsuccessfully and irresponsibly, the fact that he richly deserves disapproval, and that in some sense he may deserve to be recalled, does not mean that voters deserve to be able to recall him.
First let's look at how Bush did in California in 2000:
Al Gore Dem 5,861,203
George W. Bush Rep 4,567,429
Of course this was before he plunged the economy into a death spiral, re-started the war on the environment, decreased our freedoms, started us down the slippery slope of denying women the right to control their own bodies, and hid the Cheney documents showing the Administration's hand-in-hand friendship with the same energy companies that screwed California during the "energy crisis".
Will again:
California is not a Circuit City store. A democracy with periodic elections should not have, regarding elected officials, a liberal exchange policy -- any time, for any reason -- for voters experiencing "buyer's remorse." Californians deserve to live with the choice they made when they rehired him for four more years just four months ago
With regard to Bush, well, let's let The Onion describe it:
"You know, they say people get the government they deserve, but I don't recall knife-raping any retarded nuns."
...and we didn't even elect him.
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