Ronald Reagan was a pretty good President but like all of us not perfect. Probably his greatest blunder, like Margaret Thatcher’s and without her excuse of facing an unexpected end to her rule, lay in not securing a successor who would follow his principles. The Presidency of George H.W. Bush (Bush 41), whose break with Reagan was signaled by his slimy 1988 Convention Acceptance Speech invocation of a “kinder, gentler America” was economically a disaster; his son’s (Bush 43) subsequent Presidency was just as bad. We are still paying the price of their misdeeds and will continue to do so for decades yet.
As Nancy Reagan pointedly remarked, Bush 41’s “kinder, gentler” rhetoric was both unpleasant and disloyal. It drew a contrast with Reagan’s firm and generally successful record that appeared to validate the Left’s whining over the previous eight years. (Reagan did not defeat the Soviet Union by being kind and gentle, though he showed unexpected kind/gentle weakness on immigration with the 1986 amnesty.) In practice Bush 41’s Presidency marked a sharp reversal of Reagan’s successful policies, except in the few areas where Reagan had been mistaken, in which Bush 41 amplified his mistakes.
The most notorious Bush 41 reversal of Reagan’s policies was his 1990 tax increase. Of all the years in which a tax increase was unnecessary and indeed damaging, 1990 was the most egregious. It was by then obvious that a substantial “peace dividend” in reduced annual defense and security spending was imminent from the fall of the Communist bloc. In the event, this totaled around 2% of GDP between the fiscal years 1989 and 1993. With that quasi-automatic reduction in government spending, Bush 41 could have balanced the budget without tax increases, as he had promised in 1988, provided only that he avoided imposing new foolish social programs. Had he refrained from his unnecessary tax increase, the 1990-91 recession would have been even milder than it was, and Bush 41 would have sailed to reelection in 1992. Not that a second Bush 41 term would have done the country any good!
Instead of standing firm against the huge lobby wishing to increase taxes, Bush 41 caved in, and then allowed the Democrats to spend more than the total of the revenues raised by the new taxes on idiotic social programs, combining them with complex new regulations that tied down the natural ebullience of the U.S. economy even further. The Americans with Disabilities Act 1990, the Civil Rights Act 1991 (designed by its sponsor Senator Ted Kennedy (D.-MA) to encourage lawsuits) and the Global Change Research Act (buying into the global warming scam) all added grievous burdens of regulatory sludge and excess costs to the U.S. economy and its companies, ensuring that the ebullient growth of the Reagan years has never been seen again.
Even more damaging than Bush 41’s unnecessary tax rise was his Immigration Act of 1990, which began by imposing an additional immigration lottery system, entirely unrelated to skills and biassed towards the immigrants who would be most difficult to assimilate and most expensive in the long-term to the overburdened U.S. social security system. Even more damaging was his expansion of the H1B and similar visa systems. This created a new class of indentured servants whose chief purpose would be to allow cheap-labor-lobby employers to avoid paying the full market rate for skilled U.S. workers. It also established a thoroughly unhealthy relationship between employers and H1B workers, which because of those workers’ inability to change jobs was close to chattel slavery.
Over the 35 years of its existence, the H1B visa system has done untold damage to the U.S. economy and U.S. living standards. For one thing it has made it unattractive for the most talented U.S. students to get a STEM degree, because starting salaries in STEM areas have become increasingly artificially depressed compared with those in law, for example (which has artificial barriers against the H1B invasion). A society which prioritizes the production of lawyers and hinders the production of scientists is not one in which any sensible person would wish to live; our transition into such a society has been very largely the fault of Bush 41.
Turning briefly to Bush 41’s foreign policy; he deserves little credit for the fall of Communism, which was due almost entirely to the efforts of Margaret Thatcher and his great predecessor President Reagan. He was however responsible for starting one unnecessary war in the process, when his emissary James Baker told Yugoslavia’s Communist dictator Slobodan Milosevic that the U.S. had no objection to him holding down Slovenia, Croatia and the other Yugoslav states by force. Milosevic eventually lost, but after a five-year war in which hundreds of thousands of lives had been taken. Bush 41 also ended the Gulf War prematurely without winning it, so that job had to be done again, in far more difficult circumstances under his son.
Turning now to Bush 43: by the end of his tenure he was regarded as a more damaging President than his father, but his father’s misdeeds were better hidden, so in retrospect the scales of infamy between the two are closely balanced. Bush 43’s principal foreign policy blunder affected his entire Presidency and his historical reputation: he grossly over-reacted to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, entirely reversing his previous “modest” foreign policy and launching a Woodrow Wilsonian “nation building” military crusade across the Middle East. Presidents are paid not to overreact to random terrorism in this way. When I lived in London in the 1970s and 1980s, the IRA terrorist attacks resembled the 1812 Overture in their frequency and ubiquity and adversely affected the course of British history through the Brighton bombing. However, Britain did not launch a bombing campaign on Dublin, strong as was the temptation to do so. Similar restraint from the Bush 43 administration after 9/11 would have been welcome.
In fiscal policy, Bush 43 was probably the worst Republican President we have ever had. He inherited a balanced budget from President Bill Clinton, thanks to the prior efforts of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who ran the House sausage factory so that the Budget came out each year about $25 billion thinner than it went in. Bush 43 passed modest and poorly designed tax cuts, but his main effort was to blow out Federal spending with the assistance of the spendthrift and child-molesting Speaker Dennis Hastert, not only funding two wars, but creating a wasteful Department of Homeland Security to manage airport security. On education, Bush 43’s No Child Left Behind Act was largely dictated by Edward Kennedy; it greatly increased wasteful spending through the Education Department, entrenched the position of the Marxist teachers’ unions and through its imposed standardization of testing produced a drastic decline in educational standards that has persisted to this day.
Bush 43’s Patriot Act was grossly invasive of Americans’ civil liberties, but he also pursued a policy of ultra-high immigration, legal and illegal, which filled America’s cities with unskilled transient aliens, thereby rendering nugatory any theoretical benefit in personal safety which Americans might have got from all the Patriot Act security spending and intrusion.
In international trade, Bush 43 followed ineffectually a policy of globalization – his Doha Round of trade talks, begun in 2001, ended in abject failure. As well as encouraging immigration, Bush 43 was neutral or positive on the immense outsourcing of American jobs which the major corporate behemoths undertook during his term. Finally, when the financial crisis hit in 2008, he was completely ineffective in managing it, throwing money at Wall Street and General Motors, while doing nothing to help the relatively impoverished individuals who were the main victims of Wall Street’s mortgage and derivative scams, generally losing their houses in the subsequent downturn.
There has recently been a rumor that the Bush family are planning to reassert their control of the Republican party after President Trump’s departure in 2029. Let us all recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards to eliminate any risk of this happening!
-0-
(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)