Here are two fine op eds from the WSJ deputy editor, Dan Henninger. He writes a column every Friday.
The first is on Reaganomics and the second on the so-called Bush Doctrine.
Optimism Pays Off OpinionJournal – Wonder Land
… 25 years later and with the post-Reagan Republican Party in tatters over a confused political agenda, Mr. Laffer stood beaming at the Heritage podium to inform its audience that "illegal immigrants are the lifeblood of our society." This produced a boo-burst from a distant corner, which Mr. Laffer seemed not to notice. When so informed over a nightcap at the Willard Hotel, he said with the famous smile, "What do I care? I’ve been booed at all my life."
As, indeed, has Reaganomics over its 25-year life. On this night Mr. Laffer, famous in part for cutting down economists’ pretenses to ideas anyone can understand, had an answer for the boo-birds of Reaganomics: Almost alone, the United States since those tax cuts has managed to remain both a growth country and a developed nation.
Economic growth was always the sine qua non of supply-side tax theory, the belief that lower marginal rates would incentivize people to work, save and invest. Bob Bartley, the late editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, wanted nothing more than to focus this debate back then on the particulars of achieving growth in the economy. But for many garden-variety politicians and professional economists, the economy is an abstraction. Yes, they know something is going on out there in the workaday world, but it’s all a second-order effect of their policies and theories. So at its creation the supply-side idea instantly bogged down into an argument, alive to this day, over whether the tax cuts would "pay for themselves." You know, the deficit, the budget, the "nonpartisan" economic models at the Congressional Budget Office, blah, blah, blah. …
… During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the top marginal rate on personal incomes dropped to 28% from 70%. In 1993 Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate to 39.6%. In 2001 George Bush pushed the top rate back down to 35% and cut the rate on capital gains and dividends to 15%. Last week former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin exhorted the Democrats to raise taxes "to solve the nation’s fiscal problems."
The Rubin Solution may not be easy. Even a Democratic Congress might realize that raising taxes today is swimming against the global tides. In reversing the Clinton tax increases, passed in another age 13 years ago, and spreading tax cuts to the financial sector, George Bush has driven the roots of the Reagan tax philosophy deeper. If he resists a grand compromise on entitlements that raises taxes, it may prove to be his most enduring legacy.
A Doctrine Worth Saving OpinionJournal – Wonder Land
… we might want to think some before we toss out the infant Bush Doctrine with the Iraqi bathwater.
As stated, the doctrine’s strategy is "to help make the world not just safer but better." Some conservatives have denounced the "better world" part as utopian overstretch. Beyond that, the document lists as its goals the aspirations of human dignity, strengthening alliances to "defeat" terrorism, working with others to defuse regional conflicts, promoting global growth through free markets and trade and "opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy."
It is mainly the latter–the notion of the U.S. building the "infrastructure of democracy" that now, because of the "failure" in Iraq, attracts opposition across the political spectrum–from John Kerry to George Will and on out to neoconservatives confessing loss of faith in the Bush team to the unforgiving ear of Vanity Fair.
No doubt each of these has declared unfealty to the Bush effort for more or less honorable reasons. But someone ought to step back and consider the cumulative political effect of what of late has turned into an unrestrained gang-stomping of the sort normally seen at Miami-Florida football games. We are ensuring that no future president, of either party, will project military power anytime soon short of retaliation for a nuclear attack. Every potential presidential candidate, including John McCain, has to be looking at the Bush administration’s experience and concluding there is simply no political upside in doing so. We are backing the country’s political mind into the long-term parking lot of isolationism, something fervently wished for at opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum. …
Like the Europeans, we may talk ourselves into a weariness with the world and its various, unremitting violences. No genocide will occur on American soil, but the same information tide that bathes us in Baghdad’s horrors ensure that Darfur’s genocide will come too near not to notice. Too bad for them, or any aspiring democrats under the thumb of Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela or Islam’s highly mobile anti-democrats. We’ve got ours. Let them get theirs.
Does this overstate the buildup of anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment? Will U.S. policy, in the hands of ideologically frictionless bureaucracies, slide forward? Maybe. But even the realists and cynics might concede there has been some benefit, perhaps going back as far as Plymouth Rock, in having one nation standing for the conceit, or even the ideal, that men elsewhere with democratic aspirations could at least count on us for active support. This is the core idea in the Bush Doctrine. If its critics don’t start making some distinctions, they may discover that profligacy of opinion in our time carries a very steep price.
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