29 June 2012

Romney - Dubya The SequeI?

Dubya's real legacy may be the financial strain left after becoming the first president in American history to finance a new war with a tax cut. Actually two wars. Well, occupations, really, that went on for a very long time. And a big tax cut. The structural deficit that followed from his tax cut (that reduced revenues by trillions) and two occupations (that increased spending by trillions) left it hard to properly - and even responsibly - stimulate the economy after the recession hit.

Romney would like to repeal Obamacare, but beyond that it seems that his two most clear distinctions from Obama are his advocacy for further tax cuts and his willingness to go to war with Iran (while also halting the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan). It takes little arithmetic agility to realize that Romney's  finance-a-war-with-a-tax-cut strategy is both bad math and offers a rerun of the financial success of the Bush administration. And while Bush could sustain this strategy for years, carried by the momentum of the 90s, it's not obvious that Romney would be able to sustain such a strategy for longer than about 18 months, if that.

This does not sound like a sequel worth the admission price.

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