People forget that Reagan was also a pretty crappy president
My sense is that for the vast majority of Republicans, their current and alleged beef with President Bush is that he espoused some sort of ‘big government conservatism’. He was profligate with the nation’s finances and left the country settled with huge structural deficits.
How is this different from Reagan’s time in office exactly? They’re actually surprisingly similar.
Both presidents pushed through big tax cuts, squeezed domestic discretionary spending, though never as much as opponents feared or supporters professed to hope for, and spent lavishly on defense. Having two big wars gave President Bush more to spend on. But the broad pattern is very similar. And both ended up leaving the country with really big deficits, though Reagan did a bit in the latter years of his administration to even the balance. Again, very, very similar. So either Bush is well within the conservative tradition or Reagan is another phony.
Perhaps, had conservatives been a little more honest about the eighties maybe Bush would not have repeated all the mistakes Reagan made.
Obama’s deficit after 4 years will be greater than Bush + Reagan combined. So what am I to conclude?
It is hard to prwedict the future. Hopefully he will raise taxes to match those of other devoloped countries and avoid the fallacy that tax cuts pay for themselves.
It doesn’t make sense to critisize for what you think might happen.