里根和川普之间的大小布什，太精彩的历史分析了！

Since President Bush’s election in 2000, total federal outlays have risen by an estimated $530 billion, an increase of nearly a third. This increase can only be partly attributed to the wars the administration has fought; higher defense expenditures account for just 30 percent of the total increment, whereas increased spending on health care accounts for 17 percent, that on Social Security and that on income security for 16 percent apiece, and that on Medicare for 14 percent.24 The reality

is that the Bush administration has increased spending on welfare by rather more than spending on warfare. Meanwhile, even as expenditure has risen, there has been a steep reduction in the federal government’s revenues, which slumped from 21 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to less than 16 percent in 2004.25 The recession of 2001 played only a minor role in creating this shortfall of receipts. More important were the three successive tax cuts enacted by the administration with the support of the Republican-led Congress, beginning with the initial $ 1.35 trillion tax cut over ten years

and the $38 billion tax rebate of the Economic Growth and Tax Reform Reconciliation Act in 2001, continuing with the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act in 2002, and concluding with the reform of the double taxation of dividend income in 2003. With a combined value of $ 188 billion—equivalent to around 2 percent of the 2003 national income—these tax cuts were significantly larger than those passed in Ronald Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981.26 The effect of this combination of increased spending and reduced revenue has been a dramatic growth in the federal

deficit. President Bush inherited a surplus of around $236 billion from the fiscal year 2000. At the time of writing, the projected deficit for 2004 was $ 413 billion, representing a swing from the black into the red of two-thirds of a trillion dollars.Government spokesmen have sometimes defended this borrowing spree as a stimulus to economic

activity. There are good reasons to be skeptical about this, however, not least because the principal beneficiaries of these tax cuts have, notoriously, been the very wealthy. (Vice President Cheney belied the macroeconomic argument when he justified the third tax cut in the following candid terms:“We won the midterms. This is our due.”28) Another Cheney aphorism that is bound to be quoted by future historians was his assertion that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”29 But Reagan did nothing of the kind. The need to raise taxes to bring the deficit back under control was one of the key

factors in George H. W. Bush’s defeat in 1992; in turn, the systematic reduction of the deficit under Bill Clinton was one of the reasons long-term interest rates declined and the economy boomed in the later 1990s. The only reason that, under Bush junior, deficits have not seemed to matter is the persistence of low interest rates over the past four years, which has allowed Bush—in common with many American households—to borrow more while paying less in debt service. Net interest payments on the federal debt amounted to just 1.4 percent of the GDP last year, whereas the figure was 2.3 percent in 2000 and 3.2 percent in 1995.30 Yet this persistence of low long-term rates is not a result of ingenuity on the part of the U.S. Treasury. It is in part a consequence of the willingness of the Asian central banks to buy vast quantities of dollar-denominated securities such as ten-year Treasury bonds, with the primary motivation of keeping their currencies pegged to the dollar, and the secondary consequence of funding

the Bush deficits.31 It is no coincidence that just under half the publicly held federal debt is now in foreign hands, more than double the proportion ten years ago.32 Not since the days of tsarist Russia has a great empire relied so heavily on lending from abroad. The trouble is that these flows of foreign capital into the United States cannot be relied on to last indefinitely, especially if there is a likelihood of rising deficits in the future. And that is why the Bush administration’s failure to address the fundamental question of fiscal reform is so important. The reality is that the official figures for both

the deficit and the accumulated federal debt understate the magnitude of the country’s impending fiscal problems because they leave out of account the huge and unfunded liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security systems.The United States derives a significant benefit from the status of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency; it is one reason why foreign investors are prepared to hold such large volumes of dollar-denominated assets. But reserve-currency status is not divinely

ordained. It could be undermined if international markets took fright at the magnitude of America’s still latent fiscal crisis.34 A decline in the dollar would certainly hurt foreign holders of U.S. currency more than it would hurt Americans. But a shift in international expectations about U.S. finances might also bring about a sharp increase in long-term interest rates, which would have immediate and negative feedback effects on the federal deficit by pushing up the cost of debt service.35 It would also hurt highly geared American households, especially the rising proportion of them with adjustable-rate mortgages.