Did Bush Prevent A World Wide Recession?
In 2000, I thought that Bush’s economic plan was too expansive. I thought it cut taxes too much, and expanded spending too much. (Gore’s plan was even worse, in my opinion. Though he proposed smaller tax cuts than Bush, he proposed much more in spending, so that his total package was larger. And, neither his tax cuts not his spending increases promised much benefit to the economy.) The argument Bush’s economic team made in 2000, that the economy might be slipping into a recession, seemed plausible to me. After the bubbles of the internet and the Y2K, it seemed likely that we were due for a slowdown, or worse. Because of that possibility, immediate tax cuts made sense to me, but not some of the long range ones. The first three quarters of 2001 showed that Bush’s team had been right to worry, as the economy began to slip at the beginning of the year. Businesses, which had wildly over-invested in the dot com boom and the worry about Y2K, began to cut back sharply. Business fraud, which ha
