Victor Davis Hanson: Deficits and Depression
[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.]
We will learn in November just how angry the public is about a lot of things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment.
But the popular uproar over those issues pales in comparison with the sense of humiliation over the fact that we Americans are quite broke. In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush, not because he was too much of a right-wing tightwad, but because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits. The result was that under a supposedly conservative administration, and despite six years of an allegedly small-government Republican Congress,the national debt nearly doubled, from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion, in just eight years....
...[T]here is a growing sense of despair that even vastly increased income taxes cannot cover the colossal shortfalls. At least the high Clinton tax rates of the 1990s balanced the budget. But should we bring them back, we would still run a deficit of more than $1 trillion in 2011 — given the vast increases in federal spending.
That bleak reality creates hopelessness — and anger — among voters, who feel they are being taken for fools by their elected officials. Americans oppose tax hikes not because they don’t wish to pay down the debt, but because they suspect the increased revenue will simply be a green light for even greater deficit spending....
We are humiliated by what we owe. If we cannot pay it back, we at least want political payback.
It’s that simple this year.
Read entire article at National Review
We will learn in November just how angry the public is about a lot of things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment.
But the popular uproar over those issues pales in comparison with the sense of humiliation over the fact that we Americans are quite broke. In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush, not because he was too much of a right-wing tightwad, but because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits. The result was that under a supposedly conservative administration, and despite six years of an allegedly small-government Republican Congress,the national debt nearly doubled, from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion, in just eight years....
...[T]here is a growing sense of despair that even vastly increased income taxes cannot cover the colossal shortfalls. At least the high Clinton tax rates of the 1990s balanced the budget. But should we bring them back, we would still run a deficit of more than $1 trillion in 2011 — given the vast increases in federal spending.
That bleak reality creates hopelessness — and anger — among voters, who feel they are being taken for fools by their elected officials. Americans oppose tax hikes not because they don’t wish to pay down the debt, but because they suspect the increased revenue will simply be a green light for even greater deficit spending....
We are humiliated by what we owe. If we cannot pay it back, we at least want political payback.
It’s that simple this year.