The Bush Tax Cuts and the Republican Cult of Economic Failure (David Fiderer, HuffPo)

David Fiderer
Posted: November 10, 2010 08:46 AM
The Bush Tax Cuts and the Republican Cult of Economic Failure


There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as an honest case for extending the Bush tax cuts. Ten years of hard data prove they were a complete failure. They did not work while Bush was in office and they did not work during the first two years of the Obama administration. No wonder the Congressional Budget Office says that the GOP's proposed extension of tax cuts to the rich will reduce future economic growth.

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Under George W. Bush, U.S. GDP growth averaged about 2.1 percent a year. Since the end of World War II, the country has never experienced such low economic growth during an eight-year period. And if you exclude the war demobilization of 1946, when U.S. government spending fell by two-thirds and the GDP fell by 10.9 percent, Bush had the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover. During FDR's first two terms, when the country remained mired in a Depression, GDP growth averaged about 6.3 percent a year.

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By the end of eight years of George W. Bush's economic stewardship, 1.1 million jobs had been added to the economy. Measured against any of his predecessors, Bush was a complete failure. Clinton added 22 times as many jobs. Reagan added 16 times as many jobs. Eisenhower added three times as many jobs, when the U.S. economy was a fraction of its current size.

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Guess what happened after the U.S. economy came out of a mild recession that ended in November 2001? U.S. tax revenues plummeted. They plummeted at a rate that was unprecedented since the demobilization after World War II. And they plummeted during a time when Bush initiated a war that would leave us mired in Iraq for more than seven years.

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