The deficit as legacy -- Bush's first Treasury secretary called it

   

Paul O'Neill was pretty much run out of town six years ago, or anyway out of the White House, for helping to write a kiss-and-tell memoir that depicted President Bush as clueless on financial issues. In Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, published after the former Alcoa CEO was asked to leave his post as Treasury secretary in 2002, O'Neill said that Bush was disengaged in Cabinet meetings, "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

But the charge that really riled the White House was O'Neill's suggestion that the president's $1.6 trillion tax cuts would balloon the federal deficit, to as much as $500 billion. Critics were dismissive. As Larry Sabato, political science professor at the University of Virginia, put it:

O'Neill has a grudge to bear here and people with grudges find ways to see that they're carried out.... I doubt if there are ten people in the country who would vote against Bush because of something Paul O'Neill said in a book. [In fact] 99% of Americans don't even know who Paul O'Neill is.

Flash forward to 2008. Congress is considering a $700-billion plan to rescue the economy. And Timothy Egan, in a New York Times blog, writes that O'Neill was wrong "but only in one respect -- the projected deficit, even without a financial bailout, will almost certainly be higher." The Bush legacy, Egan writes, is:

...every bridge not built, every Pell grant not given to a kid who may never go to college without one, every national park road left to crumble, every sick person who cannot afford to see a doctor in a country that wants to be known as the best on earth.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Larry Downing / Reuters

Comments

[Chuck]

The annual budget deficit of over a half a tillion dollars is part of Bush's legacy, but even greater is Bush doubled the national debt from $5T to $10T, and it will increase to $11.3T if Congress uses taxpayer funds to save corrupt lenders.

[EJDubya]

From budget surplus to 10 TRILLION national debt and climbing. Paul O'Neill was definitely wrong.