THE LEAST HE COULD DO IS REIMPOSE THE REAGAN AUTO IMPORT QUOTAS:

"Impostor": Stirring up a fight on the right: a review of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy" by Bruce Bartlett (Bruce Ramsey, 3/17/06, The Seattle Times)

The argument of "Impostor" is that George W. Bush is not a conservative. He is another Richard Nixon, who had a conservative aura and conservatives as his political base but used the presidency to create wage and price controls, the Environmental Protection Agency and other items irritating to the conservative digestion.

It all depends on what you say a conservative is. Author Bruce Bartlett — who according to newspaper reports was fired last fall from his job at a conservative Dallas-based think tank for writing this book — defines it on Page 1: a belief in "small government, federalism, free trade, and the Constitution as originally understood." [...]

Bartlett also uses Milton Friedman's principle that the true measure of government is what it spends — and, of course, Bush has been a geyser of spending. In hindsight, says Bartlett in appreciation, Bill Clinton "now looks almost like another Calvin Coolidge," the parsimonious Republican who paid down debt from World War I.

The lowest Ronald Reagan ever got federal spending, a dubious enough measure of one's conservatism, was 21.2% of GDP, which was higher than all but Jimmy Carter's last budget. Richard Nixon, by comparison, inherited a government that spent 20.5% in 1968, and got it below 20% every year of his presidency, though it skyrocketed once he left office. It would be more accurate, if one is a Bartlettian, to say that Reagan and Bush betrayed Nixon's conservative legacy, a claim so obviously asinine that only a conservative could make it.

MORE:
U.S. hovers close to its debt ceiling (Tom Abate, January 8, 2006, SF Chronicle)

The federal debt is so mind-boggling it's no wonder lawmakers would rather not think about it. In per capita terms, the current debt is about $27,000 for each of 298 million Americans.

But economists tend to look at the national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product -- the sum total of all goods and services. This links the debt level to the nation's ability to pay and factors out inflation over time.

By this measure, the national debt has ebbed and flowed with world and political currents. According to historical tables in the 2006 federal budget, debt peaked at 121.7 percent of GDP in 1946 because of World War II spending. It fell to about 33 percent of GDP in 1980, then roughly doubled to the 60 percent range during the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush.

After hitting 67.3 percent of GDP in 1996, a few rare budget surpluses during the Clinton era drove the national debt back down to about 57 percent in 2001.

Debt as a percentage of GDP turned up again as the Bush administration began running deficits and now stands at an estimated 65.7 percent of GDP. The 2006 budget forecast predicts that the national debt will be 70 percent of GDP in 2010.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2006 7:52 AM