If you want to read a classic cocoon-right screed against yours truly, here's Big Government's Joel B Pollak. It's really something. Against my argument that Obama has cut taxes – not raised them – Pollak mentions cigarette taxes, and a slew of Obamacare fees, but doesn't mention the fact that the Bush tax cuts were sunsetted from the get-go, that Obama need not have extended them, and the massive third of the stimulus which was tax cuts, along with the extension of the payroll tax cut. They're that desperate. Then he argues that accepting the premises of almost every economist – that if you pump $800 billion into an economy, it will grow some – is a simple "post hoc, propter hoc" logical fallacy – something he links to Wikipedia's definition to help out. I kid you not.
Then this:
Aside from the war on Al Qaeda, Obama squandered every diplomatic and military success bequeathed to him by Bush. He destroyed missile defense in Europe, and wasted hard-won gains in Iraq by withdrawing troops against the advice of the military. While appeasing Iran and gutting the future of our defense, Obama alienated and undermined U.S allies.
I'm unaware of Bush's diplomatic successes, except one: the Iraq SOFA withdrawal date was signed by George W. Bush, not Obama. He has not "appeased' Iran. Iran is now enduring the most crippling sanctions and international isolation it has ever experienced – despite the brilliant idea of handing Iraq to Iran, which was inherent in anything but the most utopian versions of the Iraq war. Noel Sheppard's critique is on similar lines. He says I'm lying about my being an independent conservative who went for Obama after the Bush-Cheney catastrophe. Well, you can always check the archives, Noel. Then:
To give you an idea of the unlikelihood of this, only 20 percent of conservatives voted for Obama in 2008.
Well I was among the 20 percent. Not that unlikely, given my politics and record (I backed Clinton in 1992, for example). Then he says that Obama did not inherit a Bush recession:
Believing this requires one to completely ignore the Democrat takeover of Congress in January 2007, a 4.4 percent unemployment rate at the time, and that the recession Obama "inherited" and therefore can't be blamed for [what] began eleven months later.
He then says I'm unfair to Bush:
Bush's job performance starts from the day he was inaugurated despite him inheriting a recession from Bill Clinton.
This is what I mean by complete fantasies. Bush inherited a recession from Clinton? He inherited a boom and a surplus. He turned them into the worst recession since the 1930s and a crippling debt that made it very hard to recover. As for my point about the wrong input in the January 2009 predictions for the stimulus's effect, Sheppard simply writes:
Regardless of what the economy did in the fourth quarter of 2008, let's examine what these people predicted would be the direct result of ARRP otherwise known as Obama's stimulus plan …
So let's just ignore my point entirely and pretend I didn't write it. My case for the differential between Bush and Obama on the debt comes from the chart of the year on the Dish:
The one point I will concede I made too glibly is the CBO projected cost of Obamacare. The CBO did indeed score it as a net positive for the deficit. But there are many serious arguments that it won't in the long run. Much depends on how it evolves, how well the market exchanges work, the power of IPAB, etc. But it remains a modest, centrist reform. I actually believe that getting rid of free-riders in an already-socialized system is a good, conservative idea, as once did Gingrich and Romney. So sue me.
The Dish 