Letters to the Editor
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Huge success
From a certain point of view, Bush's fiscal policy has been a huge success. A focused, efficient military operation (Clinton's plan for the Taliban) with little opportunity for contract dollars was moved a thousand miles to Iraq and reconceived as a massive, capital-intensive permanent deployment whose strategic doctrine is essentially whatever involves the most, and most lavish, construction. Actual tactical considerations take a back seat to what is effectively the same logic that leads bankers to require mortgage-holders to live in overbuilt houses. Haliburton and its ilk have enjoyed staggeringly unprecedented war profits.
And of course everything about federal spending has followed suit — elaborate and absurd inefficiencies as an excuse to give money to favored constituents, and when no longer possible to do directly, then indirectly on the policy level, by allowing financial interests to operate the economy in very inefficient ways to their own advantage.
If Bush's people were smarter, they doubtless would have found ways to be even more precise about whose mouths the funnel leads to. I'm sure they would have preferred if rich but traitorous Americans like Warren Buffett, Al Gore, or George Soros could somehow be stripped of their assets and denied further access to wealth.
But you know, having succeeded so massively in their 8 year project, it's hard to imagine that they feel they have too much to complain about. Was it Gerhard Schroeder who described US fiscal policy under Bush as "more like looting"?