Say Anything Blog

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says that Bush’s tax cuts were “the single most significant bad decision George Bush made” because they squandered an opportunity to pay down the national debt:

But by far the lion’s share of the surpluses went into the tax cuts. It was the most profoundly un-conservative act of the Bush presidency. Rather than pay down the debt or save in the good times for the inevitable bad times, Bush squandered it all, so that all of us, particularly the high-income earners, could indulge in a bit more consumption.

Unfortunately for Mr. Zakaria, his analysis is based more on the way liberals want to see the world instead of, you know, reality.  The truth is that from 2003 to 2006, the first three years the Bush tax cuts had an impact, federal receipts from the income tax went up $276 billion.  Here are the year-by-year numbers courtesy of the Heritage Foundation (numbers in billions of dollars):

2003: $748                
2004: $832
2005: $935
2006: $1,024

And far from being “tax cuts for the rich,” the Bush tax cuts drastically increased the amount of taxes paid by “the rich.”

2003: $407
2004: $475
2005: $558
2006: $616

And it wasn’t just income tax receipts that increased.  All federal tax receipts increased:

And thanks to those increasing tax receipts, which actually outpaced spending growth for several years, federal deficits decreased:

So, in summary, after Bush’s tax cuts were put in place our federal tax receipts increased dramatically which in turn caused our federal deficits to plunge.  So, far from Mr. Zakaria’s suggestion that Bush’s tax cuts “squandered” an opportunity to shore up our nation’s fiscal situation, Bush’s tax cuts actually created such a situation.  That it was squandered by political leaders both Democrat and Republican who just couldn’t bring themselves to rein in spending is another matter entirely.