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Stephen Pollard

ByStephen Pollard, Stephen Pollard

Opinion

Where Bush really was a disaster

February 11, 2008 24:00
1 min read

There's a truly fascinating commentary at Bloomberg, which Andrew Sullivan points to: With a recession looming, the policy implications of the spending explosion are serious. If a deep recession occurs, we will have less wiggle room.

To see how different the world could have been, I gathered data from a number of sources and ran an alternative history. In that wishful place, government spending was set equal to the spending envisioned by the Congressional Budget Office in the January 2001 long-run forecast, plus the spending for the war in Iraq and to fight terrorism. This simulation assumes that the war would have happened in spite of Bush's spending promise, and wouldn't have induced him to seek cuts elsewhere.

The difference between that spending path and the one we are on is huge. Today, we expect federal spending in 2008 will be $2.9 trillion. According to the alternative history, spending would be $2.5 trillion.