All Posts Tagged With: "taxpayer"

In his final press conference as president, George W. Bush used the forum to continue to repair his legacy. One of his more passionate defenses of his administration’s policies was of his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

There’s a fundamental philosophical debate about tax cuts. Who best can spend your money, the government or you? And I’ve always sided with the people on that issue.

I have to agree with him on this one — “who best can spend your money, the government or you?” He’s proven that his government surely didn’t spend my money wisely and he’s spent my future money in the process as well, racking up record deficits and a mind-numbing national debt — just look at the ever-inflating number in my sidebar. The Wonk Room noted:

We’re not going to quibble with the notion that Bush didn’t know how to spend taxpayer money. However, he decided he knew how to best spend China and Japan’s money, which he borrowed in order to finance his tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq, driving the federal debt to historic heights.

As the Washington Post noted today, Bush “has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades”; the federal government “had a modest budget surplus when Bush took office,” but his administration ran up deficits “even as the economy was growing at a healthy pace.”

It is worth remembering that when Bush took office, it was projected that the federal government would run a $710 billion budget surplus in 2009, and that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that Bush’s tax cuts accounted for 42 percent of the fiscal deterioration between 2001 and 2008. If Bush was indeed siding “with the people,” he had an awfully funny way of going about it.

That’s Bush’s lasting legacy when it comes to government spending and borrowing and fiscal responsibility. He didn’t know how to spend our taxes wisely, so he gave “us” tax cuts (most of which went to those who needed it the least) and continued to spend-spend-spend. His legacy will be remembered for generations to come as the government uses more and more of our tax dollars just to service — not even to pay down — our mushrooming national debt.

Thanks, President Bush! We’ll never forget you!

Fox Sports broadcasters Joe Buck, Tim McCarver and Troy Aikman must be really, really important — so important that they deserve an escort from U.S. Marshals so they can get out of the stadiums quicker than the rest of us common folk. And you paid for it. TPM Muckraker reports:

A new report by the Justice Department’s inspector general finds that a lawyer for the U.S. Marshals Service arranged for the Marshals Service to provide a private escort for the limousines of Fox’s star broadcasters, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, after two World Series games at Fenway Park in 2007.

The report also found that the lawyer, Joseph Band, had arranged for a US Marshals escort for Buck and colleague Troy Aikman, the former Cowboys star, after a January 2008 NFL playoff game in Tampa.

Band was working as a paid statistician for Fox Sports at the time.