“For a bunch of small-government Republicans,” one former denizen of the White House who has now stepped back inside for the first time in eight years, “these guys built a hell of an empire.”
The political archaeologists in this case being former Clinton staffers returning to survey their once and future home only to discover an infrastructure of government several magnitude greater even as if the Republic which it governed lays in waste. The former Clinton staffers soon to be Obama staffers are dumbstruck by size of the enterprise but I say wait until they uncover the not yet fully visible damage wrought. I am sure as the we (the proverbial we in this case) regain the levers of power and bring to the full light of day all that has transpired since January 20, 2001, we will find ourselves in shock and disbelief if not outraged, perplexed and angered. Who knows the full extent of damage that the Bush Administration has wrought? How could they have gotten away with this for so long? I can’t even hazard a guess to these questions.
I am still dumbstruck by our national debt. The national debt stands now over at ten trillion dollars. When Reagan took office in 1981, the national debt stood at $995 billion. Twelve years later, by the end of George H.W. Bush’s Presidency, it had exploded to $4 trillion. It stood at under six trillion dollars when Clinton left office. Grover Norquist and his ilk didn’t drown government in a bathtub, they drowned it in debt.
And it has been a four decade long systematic assault to destroy government by spending it in oblivion. It may surprise you to learn that under President Eisenhower the highest marginal tax in the US was 91% on incomes of over $400,000. LBJ lowered it in 1964 but was forced to raise taxes again in 1968 to pay for the war and the Great Society. Still, the highest marginal tax rate was 77% on incomes greater than $200,000. But the great assault on a progressive tax structure began under economic stewardship of Ronald Reagan. Reagan cut the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest of Americans from 70% to 38%. He promised it would spur an orgy of investment and rocket the economy to new levels of production and prosperity. Instead, his “supply side economics” did the exact opposite, we got an orgy of greed and excess. It produced the deepest recession since the Great Depression. It’s hard to for me to pick the single biggest mistake of the Republican era but I’d start by looking at their tax policies.
The full story of some rather shocked folks in today’s New York Times. I wonder what shocks of discovery are yet to come from our ‘hell of an empire’?