A Passing Grade (But Only Just)

Every once in a while, the Seattle PI prints a story that justifies its continued presence in my RSS reader. Today, they had one such story. It concerns the President's "grades" on economic issues. (As a side note, if I were to grade Bush in these same areas, I would have given him a D for long term policy and a C for free trade and international economics--but I'm not an economist and I hold grudges.)

A few weeks ago, The National Journal, the highly respected and highly expensive Washington policy magazine, asked a dozen distinguished and politically independent economists to grade the Bush administration's economic performance. The magazine surveyed people like Charles Schultze of the Brookings Institution, the longtime Federal Reserve Board economist Lyle Gramley, David Wyss of Standard & Poor's, among others -- a pretty good sampling of mainstream economic thinking.

As a group, the panel gave the Bush team a B-plus for short-term fiscal policy, a C-minus for long-term fiscal policy, a B for regulatory policy and a B-minus for trade and international economics. These aren't the grades that win you a Rhodes scholarship, but they're not too bad.

What follows is what seems, to me, to be a pretty even-handed look at the Bush Administration's economic performance to this point. David Brooks, the author of the piece, goes to lengths to be fair about both the strengths and weaknesses of the policies that helped us weather an economic downturn that could have been far worse.

He ends up with a thought that should go right to the President's campaign managers, though.

I realize it's now practically illegal to have modulated views about anything related to the Bush administration, but I'd say it deserves the grades the National Journal economists gave it. What I don't understand is why the administration doesn't now pivot and say: OK, we had a potential crisis. We prevented it. Now the recovery is in full swing. Let's address the long-term problems. Let's talk about the consequences of the aging baby boomers. Let's talk about reforming the tax code to encourage domestic savings.

Not only would it make good political sense in a broad sense to push that very argument, but it would make excellent political sense when dealing with a voter like me--fiscal conservatives who wonder just how many more expansions the entitlement culture can pile on before the economy collapses.

I'm not as worried about Social Security in the next four years as I am about al Quaeda and guiding Iraq to a better form of government. But, honestly, it's running a pretty close second. What the President did with Medicare was to scare the bejesus out of me; I know that Republicans will expand programs, but the sheer, mind-boggling scope of it was terrifying.

And that was just the proposed cost, not the real bill.

Just as honestly, though, if the President were to come out and start espousing a hard-core, fiscally conservative, economic line, how many people would believe him? My guess is that he's burned through an awful lot of good will on that point; he doesn't have much room left to maneuver.

Read the article.

Posted by zombyboy at June 2, 2004 03:32 PM | TrackBack