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We’ve seen Bush’s record and his past, but what about the future? That is the most important question of this election and, even with his lacking record and questionable past, this is still the most damaging question to Bush. The image of a second Bush presidency can be formed by looking at his past and by analyzing his many proposals. It is not a pretty picture. From his enormous tax cut proposal, to a dangerous Social Security privatization scheme to a renewed push for the expensive, destabilizing and flawed "Star Wars" missile defense system, Bush is awash in policy proposals that might look good at first glance but, in all actuality, would be terribly harmful to the nation. Al Gore likes to call many of Bush’s proposals "risky." He is wrong. Risk implies that there is a chance for some big reward. With Bush, there is usually no such chance. His proposals have no upside. They are not "risky," they are simply "bad."

Before I discuss many of Bush’s policies in depth, it is important to note that these policies exist as a package. While evaluating them separately is important, you must always remember that no analysis is complete unless we look at them as part of a greater whole. With that in mind, remember that every single one of Bush’s policy proposals is colored by his enormous tax cut plan. I will discuss this tax cut in more detail later, for now, though, it is sufficient to note that the plan will cost around $1.7 trillion dollars over the next ten years. Such a costly cut will likely consume all of any future budget surpluses we may have and more. When thinking about Bush’s education, health care and other plans, remember that there was a conscious decision on priorities here. Because of this tax cut, there are no other resources left for things like education, health care, social security or debt reduction. Those resources are all going to a mammoth tax cut.

In Chapter 4 we have already seen just how light Bush is when it comes to foreign policy experience. During his tenure as governor of Texas, and before, he has had almost zero opportunity to act on a global (or even continental) stage. This has left him summarily unprepared to develop American foreign policy, a fact he has pretty much given his tactic admission to by indicating that he would have to lean heavily on his foreign policy advisers. This is a dangerous scenario. We are electing a president, not a set of advisers. Shouldn’t we expect a leader who can make the touch choices when it matters? The blank canvas that is Bush’s foreign policy experience leaves him vulnerable to the whims of conflicting forces within his own party. Indeed, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times identified this as a primary worry about a Bush presidency. "Mr. Bush has no experience in foreign policy," Friedman wrote. "The well-displayed gaps in his knowledge suggest he may not have even read the newspaper much, and this could make him easy prey for the foreign policy ideologues in his party."

This lack of a coherent vision of where Bush wants to take American foreign policy has led to the development of a dangerous and seemingly paradoxical dogma by the Bush camp that combines the worst of the traditional Republican neo-isolationism that is embodied by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Jesse Helms with an astonishingly myopic type of bullheaded-interventionism. That these two seemingly opposite strategies could be melded to form a single basis for Bush foreign policy is telling. The only real underlying theme the two strategies have in common is a complete and utter short sightedness that totally ignores the effects that decisions made today may have five, ten or fifteen years down the road. The New Republic had it right when, in an editorial, they wrote, "it’s a safe bet that a Bush foreign policy would lack that ‘vision thing.’"

Friedman is right to worry about the influences Jesse Helms and other Republican ideologues could have on the susceptible Bush. Helms, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is the second most powerful man in the country when it comes to foreign policy. For years he has almost single-handedly withheld US payment of its required UN dues, an action that nearly cost the US its seat in the General Assembly and caused serious damage to America’s ability to influence other countries around the world that will not be soon repaired. He led the charge to defeat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a treaty that was probably the single most important piece of the global effort to reduce nuclear proliferation (a treaty that was negotiated by President George HW Bush). And he did so, in part, to simply spite President Clinton; he actually raised the issue of Monica Lewinsky and impeachment in debate about the treaty. Shouldn’t such an important subject deserve to be debated on its own merits? Recently he has told President Clinton that any agreements he reached with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on missile defense would be DOA in the Senate regardless of what the agreements contained. This is also a man who was long history of backwards thinking and racist and segregationist leanings.

George Kennan, one of the fathers of the Cold War diplomacy that eventually defeated the Soviet Union once said of Stalin and his advisers at the Yalta conference of World War II

Kennan could have been writing fifty years later about Jesse Helms and his underlings at the Foreign Relations Committee. Will Bush be getting an infusion of foreign policy "know how" from the likes of this man?

It’s impossible to say just how much Republican ideologues like Helms would influence Bush’s foreign policy. What we can discuss are his likely appointees to key foreign policy positions in his Cabinet and the isolationist leanings that they have displayed in the past.

For a while, the Bush camp has been split between two factions. One, with neo-conservatives like Bush adviser Paul Wolfowitz, has pushed Bush to take a more internationalist approach that would include considering the option of projecting American power abroad in the pursuit of goals based on moral principle (like halting genocide). The other, composed of holdovers from his father’s presidency, has pushed for a much more isolationist view of the world that would have America draw itself back from global decisions. The selection of Bush Sr. stalwart Dick Cheney as Bush’s running mate and the de facto appointments of Colin Powell as Bush’s Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice as Bush’s National Security Adviser are a clear indication that the later faction was victorious.

Powell, whose service to this country and usually progressive thinking does not deserve to be lumped in with Helms’ archaic worldview, is, nonetheless, an isolationist at heart. While he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Powell opposed both U.S. intervention in Bosnia to stop the genocide of Bosnian Muslims and the use of U.S. ground forces to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. As The New Republic argued, "To a Bush administration [Powell] would bring a great deal of gravitas and a rather straightforward view of American military power: Don’t use it"

Rice is Bush’s primary adviser for national security issues and is a shoe-in as National Security Adviser should Bush be elected. Rice is an accomplished and intelligent woman, but there is no doubt that she also has strong isolationist tendencies. Rice, after all, learned her trade from Bush’s own top national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. This is the man who looked the other way as Saddam crushed an opposition uprising at the end of the Gulf War within sight of American troops.

Bush himself has started to incorporate the isolationist tendencies of his team. He has announced that he would only intervene is a foreign crises if "it’s in our national strategic interest" (read: "if it’s about oil"). He has also stated that he would refuse to use U.S. power to stop "genocide in nations outside our strategic interest." That means that the mass murder, rape and pillaging that the world has seen in Bosnia, Africa and East Timor over the past several years would get the cold shoulder from a Bush administration. Meanwhile, the Bush team has also announced that the plan to curtail the U.S.’ military presence abroad.

While ignoring genocide would set a terrible precedent, that is not the real problem with Bush’s neo-isolationist positions. The real problem is the general withdrawal from the global community that would invariably accompany such policy. This might please some of the Pat Robertson types out there who are paranoid about a "One World Order" and want to withdrawal the U.S. from the U.N., NATO and all other international bodies. It would not, however, be in the best interests in our nation. In a world without an overriding threat like the Soviet Union it would be easy to become complacent and withdrawal from the international community as we did after World War I. Such complacency would only invite disaster down the road. We have a unique opportunity to build our foreign policy around "Preventative Defense" that would identify smaller threats and crises that have the potential to blossom into greater threats in the future and deal with these issues now, when they are manageable. American doesn’t have to be the world’s policeman, but it shouldn’t retreat within its shell and ignore global issues now that it will be forced to deal with ten years hence. We found that out at great cost with Germany after World War I.

The paradoxical element of the Bush team’s foreign policy is that, while its basis is a neo-isolationist pullback of U.S. power from across the globe, it liberally sprinkles in several specific policies that can only by described as reckless internationalism. Meanwhile, the Bush camp complete ignores the incredibly distressing side effects these policies will undoubtedly cause. According to Friedman, "Mr. Bush’s offers often sounds like a we-will-do-whatever-we-want-because-we're-the-only-superpower-and-I-am-not-a-wimp-like-Clinton set of policies, which, if adopted at once, could be destabilizing and would have virtually no allied support." I do not believe that the U.S. should ever bend over backwards to appease the whims of other nations, but it is simply dangerous to completely disregard international reaction to our policies. If a policy will cause such destabilization and erosion of America’s influence and power that the end result will be a significantly greater danger to national security, then there is no reason to undertake such a policy. Bush and his team don’t seem to understand that.

Bush is willing to unilaterally withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and, in the process, destroy what is the absolute foundation of international arms control. He is desperate to waste billions and billions on a new version of Reagan’s failed "Star Wars" missile defense system despite the danger that it will set of a new global arms race.

Bush is also in opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The CTBT would ban all testing of nuclear weapons and would be the single most important step taken to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It was supported by the entire American scientific establishment (including 32 Nobel Laureates), the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all of the major U.S. nuclear weapons lab. The defeat of this treaty, the first rejection of a major international treaty since the League of Nations, holds grave consequences that will effect the United States directly eventually. India and Pakistan, two countries that have been fighting a shooting war this year and that have recently developed nuclear weapons, both had indicated that they would have signed the treaty if the U.S. had ratified it. Now, both countries are continuing the development of nuclear weapons unabated. Russia, who is probably the most important player in non-proliferation efforts due to its enormous and scattered arsenal of former Soviet nukes, has abandoned efforts to aid the U.S. in slowing proliferation. That means we can expect countries like North Korea and Iran to be able to field nuclear weapons that much sooner. Meanwhile, shooting down a treaty that the United States developed and pushed worldwide has totally eroded our leadership position – who will sign a major treaty with us if they know it will never be ratified?

Bush has also taken a hard line stance with Russia on several issues. He has voiced support for expanding NATO all the way to Russia’s border, an action that Russia views as overtly hostile. He has proclaimed that he would cut off all economic aid if Russia continues its operations in Chechnya. Now, an expanded NATO might be nice for the U.S. at some point, and pushing for Russia to stop its human rights abuses in Chechnya is a noble break from Bush’s stated policies elsewhere in the world. These policies, however, make no sense for the United States if they provoke Russia into a new Cold War. According to Russian expert Marshal Goldman, such actions "would make them paranoid." They would only fuel Russian nationalism and strengthen the Slavophiles who already harbor strong anti-U.S. feelings for our actions in the Balkans. Additionally, such actions would doom any future treaty attempts and likely eliminate any chance of future reform within Russia. Bush doesn’t seem to think all these things through before taking such rash positions. In fact, Bush’s entire foreign policy strategy seems to rely on surrounding himself in public with past foreign policy stalwarts like Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell and hoping that we don’t notice how vague and myopic his own positions are. When he’s not trying to meld Helms style neo-isolationism with his own neighborhood bully style internationalism, Bush is only capable of delivering assuring sounding platitudes in a failed attempt to mask his many inadequacies.

In his first major foreign policy speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in November, Bush assured us that his approach was one of "clear-eyed realism," whatever that is. But his speech, according to independent experts, was "vague and inconsistent" and failed to "grapple with the hard choices that inevitably would confront him in office." According to Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Bush's speech "seems to gloss over the fact that foreign policy is about having to make tough choices. He sets a series of priorities and aspirations but never really tells you how he's going to get there. And the reason is, when you get there, you have to make a trade-off."

Right now, the most major national security question facing the nation is whether or not (and in what form) to deploy a national missile defense (NMD) system. Such a system would be designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles before they could deliver their nuclear or biological payloads to major U.S. cities. On the face of it, this sounds like no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want such protection? Of course, as with most complicated national security issues, the problem is a lot more complex than it sounds; this is where Bush has problems.

Before describing the ramifications of Bush’s NMD plan, it is important to distinguish his position from the position taken by the present administration. I must note that, in my opinion, the U.S. would be much better off scrapping the entire idea of national missile defense and that the proposals of both the Clinton administration (which is supported by Bush’s opponent Al Gore) and the Bush camp are mistakes. That being said, there is a world of difference between the two positions and the ramifications each will bring.

The Clinton administration, like Bush, wants to deploy an NMD system in the next five years. Their hope, however, is to deploy a very limited system that would have only a single ground-based launch facility and would only be able to protect against limited strikes from rogue nations like North Korea or Iran. Importantly, they hope that such a system can be incorporated within the framework of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty between the U.S. and Russia or that an agreement can be reached with Russia to amend the treaty to allow such a system. This may sound like a very nitty-gritty legality, but it is not. The ABM treaty has been THE BASIS for all arms control agreements between the United States and The Soviet Union/Russia since the 1970s. The idea behind the treaty is that a working NMD system would give the country possessing it the ability to launch a massive first strike attack with impunity. The theory says that as long as neither side possesses this ability, the knowledge that such a strike would be met with an equally devastating counterattack would prevent such a strike from ever occurring. This philosophy is known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and has been the successful basis for arms control for decades. Russia and, to a lesser extent, China both worry that an American NMD system would nullify their limited nuclear capabilities and leave them vulnerable. Abrogation of the ABM treaty would, among other things, toss MAD out the window and lead us down a dangerous and destabilizing path that I will describe shortly.

Bush, unlike the Clinton administration, does not want to place limits on his NMD system. He supports a massive land, sea and space based system that is reminiscent of Ronal Reagan’s failed "Star Wars" concept, with space-based laser shooting down incoming missiles by the thousands. Most worrisome, Bush has absolutely no qualms about shredding the ABM treaty. At a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov earlier in the year, Bush told the Russians that he would deploy his ambitious system come hell or high water and that, if Russia did not agree to amend the ABM treaty, he would abrogate it unilaterally. By doing so, Cecil Johnson of Bush’s home state’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram says, Bush placed himself "squarely in the Trent Lott/Jesse Helms camp on the issue." What is so bad about all of this? A group of fifty Nobel Laureates have come out against even a limited NMD system, saying that it "would offer little protection and would do grave harm to this nation’s core security interests." Imagine what they would have to say about the Bush plan.

Again, Bush’s NMD plan is not a bad idea because the Russians and Chinese don’t like it. If the plan would truly provide the U.S. real protection against ballistic missile and do so without causing irrevocable harm to our national security in other areas then the U.S. should absolutely tell the Russians and Chinese to get lost. This is, however, not the case. The plan Bush proposes not only will not provide any protection for this country, it will take us backwards and cost us hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. There are no benefits and many drawbacks.

The first drawback to Bush’s proposal is cost. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that a limited NMD system would cost $60 billion over the next fifteen years. Bush’s much more expansive system would cost much more than that in both research and deployment costs. It’s impossible to calculate just how much the final price tag would be (remember how Reagan’s "Star Wars" system spiraled up and up in cost?) but an estimate in the hundreds of billions over the next ten years is eminently reasonable. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars that could be spent on education or health care or to reduce the debt or to finance tax cuts.

While awfully excessive, those hundreds of billions might be worth it if the system could actually work, but it can’t. The scientific reality of National Missile Defense is that the technology to make it work is not available yet and is not likely to be in the foreseeable future. Not only those previously mentioned fifty Nobel Laureates have come out against it; in June 35 more noted scientists and engineers testified before Congress that the system was a failure waiting to happen. Noted Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried told Congress the system "may never be ready, it’s a flawed process." Ted Postol, an MIT physicist and expert on missile defense who helped the U.S. develop the sub-launched Trident 2 missile might be NMD’s biggest critic. He claims that "this system has no chance of working." Tests of the limited system have proven Postol and Gottfried right so far. Two of three tests the Pentagon has run so far have been abject failures even though the tests were rigged for success. Unlike any realistic scenario, these tests have included only one, unrealistic decoy (whereas the real system will need to pick the true warhead out from dozens of almost indistinct decoys). In the Pentagon tests, the "kill vehicles" being tested have also been given the unfair advantage of knowing exactly when and where the incoming warhead would be and vibration levels in the system being tested have been reduced by a factor of ten to improve the system’s chances. Still, the system has failed its test twice and succeeded only once. That’s hardly encouraging for program that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

More worrisome is that, even if the system could be made to hit incoming ballistic missiles (a big if), any country with the technology to launch such missiles would be able to easily defeat the system using simple countermeasures. Postol and nine other scientists conducted a year-long study of the effects countermeasures would have on the proposed NMD system and found that it could be defeated by countermeasures as simple as mylar balloons. That’s right; in space an inflated mylar balloon has the exact same equations of motion as a nuclear or biological warhead. An attacking nation could sheath the warhead in such a balloon and released it, along with dozens of decoys that would overwhelm the NMD system. The TRW infrared (IR) sensors being used in NMD prototypes have been unable to distinguish between real warheads and mylar decoys. Postol and his collaborators also found that the system could easily be defeated by a system that deployed from a single missile, instead of one warhead, hundreds of biological weapons bomblets. Additionally, the group found that developing liquid Nitrogen technology to defeat NMD’s heat seeking sensors would be simple compared to the enormous task of developing the missile and nuclear technology needed to launch a nuclear missile at a U.S. target. Postol’s claims were corroborated by Nina Schwartz, a TRW scientist who left the company after blowing the whistle on the inadequacy of her company’s sensors. She revealed that the IR sensor technology that TRW was trying to develop was "hopelessly flawed."

The chances of an NMD system being effective against incoming ballistic missiles is slim. The technology isn’t there yet and, even if it were, it would be easily defeatable by simple countermeasures. Moreover, the NMD system does not address the most likely avenue of attack for a terrorist nation armed with a weapon of mass destruction. Such a nation wouldn’t need to launch a missile at New York, it could simply load its weapon in the hold of a boat and sail it up the Hudson River. National Missile Defense would be helpless against crude delivery systems such as this; delivery system that are much more likely to be used by the rogue nations that are the most dangerous threats of such an attack.

The most dangerous aspect of Bush’s push for a massive NMD system is not the prospect that it will be ineffective. While wasting hundreds of billions of dollars is something we would be wise to avoid, if such a waste were the only drawback to Bush’s system one might be able to argue that such a monetary loss would be worth the attempt of creating a missile shield for the nation, even if the shield was unlikely to work. There is, however, a much bigger problem, one that Bush refuses to acknowledge.

Building an expansive NMD system, and abrogating the ABM treaty in the process is an invitation to disaster. In a sense, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we build NMD, we will be much more likely to need it in the future. Abrogation of the ABM treaty would trigger a world-wide wave of destabilization that could very easily result in a new Cold War pitting the U.S. against a unified Sino-Russian bloc, a new regional arms race in Southeast Asia, the increased rate of proliferation of nuclear materials and missile technology to rogue states like North Korea and the loss of hard-won U.S. prestige and influence with both our allies in Europe and other nations around the globe. It may sounds a bit like some doomsday scenario, but it is not. Bush’s NMD plan is a terrible idea that will have an extremely adverse impact on U.S. national security in the very near future.

While the blatant animosity that existed between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War does not exist today between the U.S. and either China or Russia, there is still a state of unsettling distrust. Meanwhile, there exist factions within each nation that would love nothing more than to push their country towards a more clearly anti-U.S. path. To understand the full impact of Bush’s plan on Russia and China (which Bush, apparently does not) one must understand the significance that the letter and spirit of the ABM treaty has to both countries. China’s nuclear forces are very limited, but are strong enough to deliver a resounding blow to the U.S. should we launch a first strike. Russia has been attempting to reduce its own nuclear forces in an effort to shift more resources to non-military uses. Though much smaller than the Cold War days, their nuclear force also remains a credible deterrence to U.S. attack. Now, everyone here knows that the U.S. is not going to launch a nuclear attack against either China or Russia. But attitudes are different over there, and suspicions of the U.S. remain in almost all levels of society. Neither country is willing to simply take the U.S. at its word that a NMD system would not be aimed at giving the U.S. the ability to launch a first strike with impunity. Both countries would view abrogation of the ABM treaty and development of NMD on the scale Bush proposes as a hostile act.

Russia’s new president Vladimir Putin has placed a renewed emphasis on arms reductions since being elected. The need to cut costs has pushed Putin and Russia to take a more accommodating stance with the U.S. on this issue. As a result, Putin pushed both the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and START II, which called for a significant reduction in the level of nuclear warheads either side could keep, through the Duma (Russia’s lower house of parliament). Putin has also pledged to work towards START III, an even further reduction in warheads. Should Bush implement his NMD system and abrogate the ABM treaty, those gains will all be lost; Putin has said as much.

More worrisome than Russia’s reaction, might be that of China. Right now, China has a very limited force consisting of only twenty liquid-fueled, single warhead CSS-4 missiles, all of which are housed in vulnerable silos. A working NMD system of the size Bush proposed would likely be able to fully counter China’s entire nuclear arsenal. While this sounds wonderful, such a scenario would, in fact, be significantly destabilizing and would force China to undergo a full scale upgrade in their nuclear armament which would, in the end, make them a much more dangerous threat. China’s own chief arms control negotiator, Sha Zukong, has said as much. According to Sha, if the U.S. were to build even a limited NMD system "we would not sit on our hands." The most recent Nation Intelligence Estimate, which is conducted cooperatively by the entire U.S. intelligence community, forecasted that an NMD system like Bush’s would cause China to expand and modernize its forces including building more long and medium range missiles and deploying MIRVs (Multiple Individual Reentry Vehicles). One senior government official predicted that China could have over 200 warheads by 2015 if the U.S. were to attempt to implement a Bush style missile shield.

More ominous than separate build ups by Russia and China would be the prospect of a the development of a new Cold War with the United States on one side and China and Russia aligned on the other. The two countries have already taken steps to come closer in opposition to a potential U.S. missile shield. At a Sino-Russian summit earlier in the year, the two countries released a join statement vowing to strengthen their strategic partnership and declaring that a breach of the ABM treaty would surely "trigger a new arms race." Moreover, Sha himself noted that Russia and China are discussing possible cooperative efforts in developing techniques "to restore strategic stability… and defeat your system." This is in response to the Clinton administration’s proposed limited system. Imagine how Bush’s system would bring China and Russia together.

The effects of Bush’s plan won’t be limited to just Russia and China, however. Those are just the two starting points for what the National Intelligence Estimate predicted would be a "wave of destabilization around the world." China’s build up would force its long time adversary India to follow with a nuclear build up of its own. Pakistan, India’s long time enemy, would then be forced to follow. Bush’s plan would cause nothing less than a massive and destabilizing nuclear arms race within the Southeast Asia subcontinent. Remember, India and Pakistan have been in a shooting war this very year and Pakistan’s democratic government was recently overthrown by a very hawkish military government. The two countries have also been consumed in a game of nuclear one-upsmanship with each side testing more and bigger nuclear warheads. If there is one region in the world that is the most at-risk for a nuclear conflict it is this one. Putting more kindling on this fire is not in the interests of the U.S. or anyone else, yet Bush would do just that.

Bush’s plan would reach more than Southeast Asia. It would also be the deathblow for worldwide non-proliferation efforts. Recall that both India and Pakistan have said they would sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty if the U.S. would ratify it. Bush has said that he will not re-submit the treaty. That will only add to the effect of his destabilizing NMD plan and will lead to an even bigger regional arms race in Asia. Such a regional arms race will make it that much easier for North Korea to eventually acquire the technology it needs to threaten the U.S. More worrisome, the U.S. will also lose any and all cooperation it has been receiving from Russia on China on proliferation issues. Russia and China are, of course, the two countries that are most able to effect such issues as they have both the nuclear and missile technologies that countries like North Korea and Iran are seeking. The National Intelligence Estimate predicted that China and Russia would not only halt cooperation in preventing proliferation but also actively attempt to spread threatening nuclear and missile technology as well as countermeasure technology to help countries like Iran and North Korea defeat any NMD system we could build.

Bush’s NMD plan would not only force countries like China and Russia into more adversarial positions, but it would also hurt our standing with both unaligned nations around the globe and our closest allies. The abrogation of a treaty that we signed in goodwill, especially when it is coupled with the trashing of another treaty for which we were the driving force (the CTBT), will severely limit the ability of the U.S. to negotiate future treaties on any level. Who will be willing to deal with us when we have such a track record?

Even our NATO allies are adamantly against a NMD system. The National Intelligence Estimate predicts that such a system would "enrage our allies." It is right. Most of our allies, like German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, believe that it will "trigger a new arms race." They also worry about what such a step would be the beginning of a "de-coupling" of the U.S. and its traditional European allies. French security expert Francois Heisboiurg put those worries into words, "quitting the ABM treaty would send an unfortunate signal about America’s readiness to play by the agreed rules rather than unilaterally."

Bush has said he wants a system that protects all fifty states and our allies. How could he build such a system if our allies don’t want it? Even a system that protected only the continental U.S. would requir installations on European territory (such as Greenland or England). According to Defense Secretary William Cohen, "In order to have an … effective system we need the support of our allies." Such support is, to put it lightly, unlikely.

There is a lot to worry about when it comes to the proposition of foreign policy under a Bush presidency. The inherent contradictions of his positions would lead to a wholly incoherent mess in his foreign policy decisions. The gaping holes in his foreign relations experience and knowledge will be readily filled by the neo-isolationists of his party who will easily prey on Bush’s already isolationist leanings. His National Missile Defense plan is a terrible disaster waiting to happen. It is a costly and ineffective system that could lead to global destabilization, a new Cold War against a united China and Russia, the de-coupling of the U.S. and its NATO allies a sharply increased danger of nuclear attack from rogue states like Iran and North Korea. Foreign Policy is not a game and it’s not easy. Bush doesn’t have the experience, grasp of issues or intelligence to handle the complex issues the next president will surely face in this area.

The effect of Bush’s five years as governor on Texas’ educational system was recounted in Chapter 1. It was a disaster. Bush’s decision to tie student advancement, teacher pay and school funding to a single indicator, scores on the statewide TAAS exam resulted in a dumbing down of curricula, increased dropout rates and a much poorer education for Texas students. Similar efforts to tie funding to a statewide test have resulted in corruption cases in Maryland, California, Louisiana, Ohio and New York as well as in Texas. Now, Bush wants to bring the same kind of "accountability" to all of our nation’s schools by tying federal funding of schools to statewide exams similar to TASS. I have described in detail how such a tie in Texas has resulted in schools dropping the teaching of fundamental skills and lessons in favor of TAAS preparatory drilling. Bush’s proposal would offer incentive for such onerous change across the nation. Deborah Meier, a noted education reformer who has spent her entire life trying to reform our nations public schools said that if we are seeking true education reform, Bush’s plan "is a lazy and cheap way…. We should be focusing on smaller schools and keeping students and parents more involved in decision making."

Another big part of Bush’s education plan are vouchers that would take money out of the budgets of public schools and be given directly to parents to use for a private education. This plan is extremely popular with the Religious Right (because it would result in a huge influx of federal money into religious schools) but not as much with the general population (which is why Bush hardly ever uses the word "vouchers" to describe his plan). There is good reason for the public to be wary of his plan.

First of all, Bush’s plan simply isn’t that effective. Nothing would happen to a failing school at all for two years. A school could be falling apart and, for two years, nothing would be done. In the third year, some percentage of the school’s students would receive a $1500 voucher that could be used at a private school. What the percentage would be is uncertain. Obviously, most students would not be able to move to private schools – there just aren’t enough places in private schools to accommodate all public school students. Thus, most of the kids in the failing school would remain there. Meanwhile, at the failing school, life would go on, only with less resources. The money to pay for the vouchers of the students lucky enough to get them would come out of the failing school’s budget.

Compare this to a plan developed by the American Federation of Teachers, which is the model for the plan advocated by Bush’s opponent, Al Gore. Under the AFT plan any failing school is shut down completely at the end of the semester. It would be redesigned with a new administration, teachers and programs. Every parent (not just a small percentage) would be guaranteed access to any other public school in the same school system.

A big problem with Bush’s voucher plan is that it drains much needed money away from public schools. The $1,500 that each student with a voucher takes to private schools comes directly from the funds of the failing school he leaves. Remember, most students in that school won’t be able to take advantage of the vouchers (either because there won’t be a place for them or because a private school will still cost too much even with the voucher). According to Paul Peterson, the lead investigator of a Harvard University study on vouchers, the best test case so far was a Milwaukee experiment in which only ten percent of the kids found seats in public schools. So, a small percentage of students will do well under Bush’s plan, but the majority will be left behind in schools that were already failing and that will lose even more precious resources.

Plans like the one Bush has suggested have been floated in the GOP dominated Congress before. A Bush-like plan was shot down by a two-to-one margin in committee in the House and a ten-state test of a Bush-type plan was voted down on the House floor by a convincing 271-153 margin with 66 Republicans defecting. Even the GOP Congress thinks that Bush’s plan is a bad idea.

There are other big problems with the voucher portion of Bush’s plan. For one, it is probably unconstitutional. Since 1947, the Supreme Court has never upheld a program that allowed for any sort of public funding of religious schools. Bush’s plan would do just that. Also, vouchers have almost always led to increased social and economic segregation as better off students (who are usually white) have been able to take advantage of vouchers and moved to expensive private schools. Meanwhile poorer students (who are often minorities) have still been unable to afford expensive private schools despite vouchers. In the 1950s and ‘60s many southern states explicitly used vouchers to circumvent desegregation laws and fund private white academies. While Bush’s plan certainly does not seek to do any such thing, his plan would likely increase racial and economic segregation nonetheless.

While Bush’s "accountability" and voucher plans are at the center of his education proposals, he has supplemented them with a limited amount of money for other initiatives. These include $5 billion for a reading program that would try to ensure that kids could read by third grade, $2 billion for recruiting and training teachers and other smaller packages that add up to a total of about $13 billion over five years.

With a projected surplus in the trillions of dollars, Bush can find almost $2 trillion for his tax cut plan but he can only find $13 billion for education? Where exactly are his priorities? In such good times there is, in my opinion, nothing that deserves a bigger investment than the education of our children. Bush and his conservative cronies like to deride those who would increase education spending by saying "you can’t just throw money at the problem." While it’s true that real reform of the system (the kind Deborah Meier preaches, not the kind Bush does) is important, to discount the importance of committing more resources to education is laughable. Many of America’s schools are crumbling; they need to be rebuilt so that kids don’t attend class in trailers. Many of America’s schools are overcrowded; we need new schools and new teachers so that we can get class sizes down. Many of America’s schools are outdated; we need new equipment like computers or science labs or even new textbooks so that our children don’t start at a disadvantage. There aren’t enough good teachers in America; we need to increase teacher pay so that we can attract more bright people to the profession and we need to commit to improving teacher training so that those teachers we have can do their jobs better. Too many children don’t have access to pre-school and kindergarten; we need to make those things universal. Bush, it seems, disagrees. These investments are not important to him. "Money does matter," according to Amy Wilkins, a principal partner of The Education Trust, a non-partisan group that pushes for improving the country’s education system. "You can’t get a higher level of achievement without committing the federal resources necessary, and to say you can is a little bit hollow." When you compare the paltry $13 billion that Bush would spend on education to the $115 billion that his opponent would spend, you get a real understanding of just where his priorities lie.

We saw in Chapter 1 just how cozy Bush has been in Texas with the NRA and the pro-gun movement. He has pushed through laws allowing citizens to carried concealed guns even in churches and synagogues. He has opposed closing the gun-show background check loophole. He has protected the gun industry from lawsuits seeking recompense for the millions of dollars gun related deaths and injuries have cost Texas cities and municipalities. The NRA has embraced him fully. It’s not surprising that they are salivating over the prospects of a Bush White House.

NRA vice president Kayne Robinson has said that the NRA enjoys an "unbelievably friendly relations" with Bush and that a Bush victory would ensure a Supreme Court "that will back us to the hilt." Unbelievably, he even told NRA members that if Bush wins "we’ll have … a president where we work out of their office." Chuck Heston, the NRA’s ultra-visible president has acknowledged that Bush is a good friend of his group.

The NRA has backed up their rhetoric with big bucks. So far this election cycle, it has given millions to the GOP and nothing to the Democrats. In fact, the NRA has pledged up give up to $15 million to the GOP. They haven’t limited their generosity to the GOP in general though. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president was a co-chairman of Bush’s huge $21 million GOP fundraiser and has pledged to raise $200,000 for Bush’s campaign by himself. That’s $200,000 from just one of the NRA’s big guns.

Why has the NRA jumped so enthusiastically into bed with Bush? Because Robinson is right. With Bush, the NRA will be able to set the nation’s gun policy. This would be a terrible result for the nation and, in particular, its children. The NRA is not about protecting 2^nd Amendment rights as it would have us believe. They have distorted the 2^nd Amendment beyond all recognition. They are an overzealous organization that will do and say anything to prevent any kind of meaningful gun control laws in this country. LaPierre, for example, even claimed that President Clinton actually wanted to continue to see violent acts against youths, like the tragedy at Columbine, because it would keep support for gun control up. That’s right, he actually claimed that the President wanted to see children continue to die. These are then men that will have Bush’s ear should he be elected.

There will be no gun-show background checks. No ban on juveniles possessing semi-automatic assault weapons. No ban on the import of high capacity ammo clips. No raising the minimum handgun possession age from 18 to 21. You can bet that Bush will come to the rescue of gun makers just like he did in Texas and move to ban suits against them nationwide. In fact, gun makers are counting on just that. The nation’s gun makers have broken off settlement talks with 31 cities and counties nationwide in the hope that Bush will win and ban municipal suits just as he did in Texas.

Chapter 1 detailed Bush’s sale of Texas’ environment to his biggest campaign contributors. He appointed representatives of the state’s biggest polluters and businesses to Texas’ environmental regulatory agency. He allowed the state’s biggest polluters to write their own "voluntary" clean up plan. He scrapped much needed auto-emission standards and used the state’s environmental protection budget to pay the penalty Texas incurred for breaking the contract it had signed with the firm that had already set up the testing stations needed to enforce the standards. The Texas Sierra Club put it best, "with Bush’s environmental track record – you know he’s running on empty."

We can expect lots more of the same on a national level if Bush is elected. A likely Bush appointee to head the EPA, Barry McBee, had such a terrible record of gutting Texas’ environmental protection laws while on the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Committee and as head of Texas’ Department of Agriculture that he was nicknamed the "skinny Hitler." You can bet that, as President, Bush will continue to put the interests of big business and big polluters (and big campaign contributors) ahead of the interests of the American people. His track record in Texas is just too strong to believe there could be any other result.

Bush, knowing that his environmental record his so bad that he could say little if anything to sway voters with it, has avoided talking about the environment as much as possible. He has advanced a couple of positions, however. They, as we would expect, are in line with his Texas record. Bush has proposed deregulating the cleanup of so-called "Brownfields," old industrial areas that are heavily polluted. The Sierra Club noted that Bush’s proposals would "leave workers there vulnerable to health risks as well as threatening contamination of groundwater and the environment." Bush has also, to no one’s great surprise, come forward in support of opening Alaska’s huge Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. While this would be a huge boon to Bush’s backers in the oil industry, it would be a disaster to an ecosystem that dozens of species rely on.

Bush’s backers in Big Oil and other major polluting industries are already planning for lax environmental enforcement under a possible Bush presidency. Russell Harding in Michigan’s top environmental official and an appointee of big time Bush backer, Governor John Engler. Harding has fought the EPA to loosen environmental regulations for years. In April, Harding convened a meeting of representatives of 17 other states (most with GOP governors) and representatives of some the nation’s biggest polluting industries including oil and energy companies, utilities like Edison Electric (a big Bush contributor), auto makers and the paper sector. Bush appointee Robert Huston was also present. The meeting’s organizers said, according to the Washington Post, "they hope to fashion more business friendly environmental policies for the next administration." This is nothing more than a repeat of the fateful industry meeting in Texas that led to Bush’s ridiculous "voluntary" plan that has helped Texas’ air become perhaps the worst in the country. As Ken Cook, the president of the Environmental Working Group, noted, the gathering was nothing more than "a secret meeting to plot dirtier air."

If Bush as president we can expect exactly what Texas got: more dirty money flowing from the country’s biggest polluters to Bush’s campaign coffers and more dirty air flowing from their smoke stacks.

There are 44 million uninsured Americans. This is one of the most important problems that the next President will face. This was also one of the most important problems George W. Bush faced in Texas which has one of the highest rates on uninsured in the nation. In Texas, moving these people onto insurance rolls was not a priority for Bush. In fact, as is described in Chapter 1, Bush did his utmost to prevent insuring hundreds of thousands of the Texans who need insurance most: its children. Recently a federal judge has ruled that Texas has ignored a 1996 consent decree requiring it enroll children who are eligible for Medicaid or CHIPs in those programs. Expanding coverage was obviously not one of Bush’s big concerns in Texas. It won’t be as president either.

Bush’s plan calls for a $2000 tax credit for families with an income up to $30,000 and no medical coverage. Families making more would receive a lesser credit that would be phased out entirely at $60,000. The plan also calls for the increased use of Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs), accounts which families could fund and then call upon when they need to pay medical bills, and the creation of Association Health Plans that would group small businesses together to buy insurance. There are major flaws with all aspects of Bush’s plans.

Bush’s plan is, to say the least, completely inadequate. $2000 in simply not enough to cover the cost of a decent family health plan. It’s not even close. "This is the Field of Dreams approach," says Jonathan Gruber, and economics professor at MIT. "If you build it they will come. But it’s hard to imagine that they’ll come up with a product that cost’s $2000 that is valued by families. You’re talking about shaving 2/3 of the cost off a health insurance policy. How will you have a good product?" Gruber estimates that Bush’s credit would cover only 31% of the premiums of a typical family. Chip Kahn, the head of the Health Insurance Association of America (which represents HMOs) agrees, "a decent family plan" costs $5000-$6000 he says.

Families USA, a non-profit group that fights to cover more Americans, agreed with Kahn’s and Gruber’s assessments. "The Bush proposal is a trivial response to a serious problem," a Families USA press release said. "At best it offers an ineffective placebo for the growing uninsurance epidemic. At worst, it is a very harmful prescription." As Families USA noted, a family making $30,000 would still have to pay over 13% of their before tax income on health insurance. Where are they going to find the money to pay for rent or food?

The incredible insufficiency of Bush’s plan is even more striking when you compare it to the plan put forth by his father in 1992. Keep in mind that, in 1992, Bush "Sr." was facing a record deficit. In 2000, Bush "Jr." is presented with the largest surpluses ever. Still, Bush Sr.’s proposed $5100 per family: almost enough to cover a family. Bush Sr. obviously had a bit more compassion that his son.

As troubling as it is, insufficiency is not the biggest problem with Bush’s plan. Aside from being ineffective, the plan would be downright harmful.

First, Bush’s plan actually creates a large incentive for employers to drop health care benefits entirely. Because the plan would only provide tax credit for families who are not already covered by government or employer policies, employers would be likely to eliminate coverage for their employees reasoning that, once the employees are no longer covered at work, they can take advantage of Bush’s plan. Of course, Bush’s plan won’t come anywhere near to restoring the lost coverage. Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution believes that Bush’s plan will have exactly this effect on many businesses. The result would be more families without coverage and a higher cost to the taxpayer.

Second, Bush’s plan will make health care more expensive for a large portion of Americans. The whole point of health insurance is to get the largest number of people possible into one insurance pool. With a large number of healthy people in the pool, the insurance can absorb the cost of treatment for the smaller number of sick people who need extensive care thus diluting the cost of coverage for all of the pool’s members. If a pool is small or, even worse, if healthy people are removed from the pool, the cost of covering the pool’s sick member cannot be absorbed and that makes coverage simply unaffordable. That is why 60% of Americans who don’t have insurance either work for small businesses or have relatives who do. These small businesses cannot get into large insurance pools so they cannot provide coverage for their employees.

One way to get around this problem is to have many small businesses pool their resources together to form larger pools. Right now, in most states, small businesses can do just that. To do so, however, they are required to abide by state regulations that are designed to prevent the kind of risk selection that makes insurance unaffordable in the first place. These regulations require businesses to offer insurance plans with basic benefits (including mental health coverage) to all subscribers and to use the money from the less expensive subscribers (the healthy ones) to pay for the more expensive ones.

Bush’s Association Health Plans would be exempted from any state regulations. This would mean that businesses with more unhealthy employees would face huge cost increases that would most likely mean they would have to drop coverage of their employees entirely or offer sharply reduced benefits. Meanwhile, the cost of an individual or family purchasing their own coverage would also sharply increase as Bush’s plan would halt the practice of having the premiums of small business subsidize individual coverage (basically, Bush’s plan would exclude individuals and families from joining in the pools of small business employees – when you have a pool of one costs are extremely high).

What Bush’s plan is doing is allowing businesses to segregate the sick from the healthy. This goes against the most basic logic of health insurance and will result in a wholly inefficient system with huge costs. The other part of Bush’s plan does the exact same thing. MSAs basically allow people who expect to be healthy to opt out of large insurance pools. These people can forgo regular coverage and place a small amount of money in their MSA to cover the limited costs they expect. Meanwhile, people who are likely to incur higher medical costs are unable to opt out and are faced with higher premiums. In fact, experts agree that MSAs not only segregate the healthy from the sick, they also segregate the wealthy (who can afford to put money into these accounts) form the poor (who cannot). The poor still have to rely on traditional coverage that becomes much more expensive and more difficult for employers to provide.

Who benefits from Bush’s plan, then, if it is not the uninsured who need it most? You guessed it, it’s business. Association Health Plans were created, marketed and sold by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which represents businesses) and other business advocacy groups. They’ve been trying to get out from state regulations for years. MSAs, AHPs and even Bush’s tax credit all offer opportunity and incentive for businesses to drop costly coverage entirely. Don’t think that Bush doesn’t know who he is selling this too. He ha always been a protector of businesses at the expense of the people and he knows who fills his campaign’s coffers. When Bush released his proposal he included a contact list of institutions that helped craft the policy. This is normal practice; such contact lists usually include a variety of think tanks and/or academics. Four of the Five contacts of Bush’s list came from two lobbies representing business interests: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Individual Business.

What would the results of Bush’s plans be in hard numbers? The plan would cost about $150 billion over ten years. It would use those funds in an extremely inefficient way. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will add only 330,000 of the nations 44 million uninsured to the insurance rolls. That’s about $500,000 per person! Gruber notes that the approach of Bush’s opponent, expanding federal programs like CHIP, is "just a much more efficient use of public dollars." Moreover, the same CBO analysis says that businesses that could not participate in Bush’s plan would be forced to raise premiums. What we have is a $150 billion program that would insure only 330,000 new people and cause millions more to pay more for the insurance they already have. That doesn’t sound very good to me.

There is absolutely no question which of Bush’s policy initiatives is the most important. Bush proposed his massive tax cut plan early in the primaries and has pushed it vigorously ever since. Make no mistake about it, the Bush tax cut it the centerpiece of Bush’s candidacy. It effects every single one of his proposals and, if he were able to pass it into law, it could affect every aspect of a Bush presidency. The decision to put so much weight on a huge tax cut is telling both in terms of policy and in terms of priorities for it effects both significantly. His plan demonstrates that Bush believes tax cuts are a higher priority that making a greater federal investment in education, shoring up Social Security, creating a prescription drug benefit for seniors, improving and expanding health care for all Americans or paying down the national debt – there will simply be no money left over for any of these problems after Bush’s tax cut. Additionally, Bush’s plan demonstrates that, at his core, he is an old guard Republican. This plan relies on the same assumptions and theories his father rightly ridiculed as "voodoo economics" two decades ago. The result of that thinking in the ‘80s was a huge national debt and sluggish economy. Bush believes that the result will be different now.

What is the impetus behind this plan anyway? Bush insists that he merely wants to relieve the average American family from the ‘huge’ tax burden it now labors under and that the surplus we are now enjoying is "the people’s money" and should be returned to them. Do these arguments really hold water? The later is certainly a powerful bit of rhetoric, but not much more. The surplus may be "the people’s money" but the trillion of dollars of federal debt also belong to the people. The education of our children belongs to the people. The assurance that everyone will have a functional Social Security System belongs to the people. Bush’s argument that the surplus is merely the people’s money is overly simplistic and ignores the underlying reality that the decision about using the surplus we now enjoy is really a question of deciding just what our nation’s priorities really are. Would a family that, after struggling to make ends meet for a decade and falling further and further in debt, found itself presented with a sudden windfall (a major raise for the breadwinner for instance) rush out to spend the entire surplus on a new sports car? Or would it try to pay off some of its debt and perhaps invest in better schools for it children and maybe put a little money away in an IRA for the future? This is, for all intensive purposes, the question the country faces now. Bush would choose to buy the sports car.

What about Bush’s former argument that the country is suffering under an unbearable burden and crying for it to be lifted? He has tried to make this argument both of very specific and on very general levels. Campaigning around the country, Bush has often invoked the image of a hypothetical family of a single mother of two children making $22,000 a year as a waitress. Bush has claimed that such a mother is in desperate need of a tax cut and that she will get significant relief under Bush’s plan. In all actuality, a single parent with two children who makes less than $27,000 pays zero federal income tax thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit; it would be difficult for Bush to improve on that. Bush’s argument rings just as hollow on a general level. He has consistently claimed that "after eight years of Clinton-Gore we have the highest tax burden since World War II." What Bush doesn’t say is that this claim is based on an outdated method of calculation, defining tax burden as tax revenue divided by GNP. This method penalizes the fact that the US is enjoying its lowest unemployment levels ever. It also hasn’t factored in the increased wealth Americans have achieved through the stock market; the tax revenues used in Bush’s calculations include the significant chunk of money collected through capital gains taxes on successful investments but the GNP figure does not include the investment gains themselves. Four independent organizations from all over the political spectrum have recently done much more accurate studies on the tax burden faced by most Americans. They all agreed that for more than 95% of Americans, today’s federal income tax burden is the lowest it has been in four decades. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the middle fifth of American families pay an average rate of 5.4% (compared to 8.3% in 1981). The Treasury Department found that a four-person family making the national median income pays the lowest rate since 1965. Even the ultra-conservative Tax Foundation found that a two-person family making the national median has the same burden now as it did in 1955. Hey, we all hate paying taxes and we would all like to pay less. The fact is, however, that right now we are paying less than we have in decades, at least in federal income taxes. Trying to claim otherwise, and basing a huge tax cut on that claim, is disingenuous.

Understanding Bush’s plan is not difficult. It is pretty straightforward. A major part of the plan would be the elimination of the estate tax, a tax conservative Republicans have long been trying to repeal. Bush, and other Republicans, argue that the estate tax is an unfair burden on people inheriting estates from relatives, especially farms and small businesses. This is a bit of a stretch. All estates worth less than $675 thousand are exempt from the estate tax and that limit jumps to $1 million in 2006. Small businesses are exempt up to $2.6 million. These exemptions cover most estates. In fact, 98% of estates pay no estate tax. Only three percent of those estates that do pay tax have a significant farm or small business component. Bush’s argument rings hollow again. A mere 3000 estates pay over one half of all estate taxes. Bush’s repeal would have no effect on almost all Americans; it would benefit only a few thousand of the wealthiest families in the country. The repeal would, however, come back to haunt those Americans who it fails to benefit. Estate taxes bring in $28 billion in revenue every year; that number will soon reach $50 billion. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade that could otherwise go to pay down the debt or be used to invest in our schools. Over the second ten year the cost would be even greater: $750 billion of which fully one half would go to only the wealthiest one tenth of one percent of the American people. Neil Hart, a law professor and author of three books on the estate tax, knows what Bush is trying to pull. "I’m convinced it’s a stalking horse for those with huge estates who now they would have trouble arguing they should get a break."

Bush’s plan would benefit the wealthy in more ways than one. He would also make the system more regressive by eliminating one of the five present tax brackets. Additionally, he would lower the rates on all four brackets. Those seeing the most return, though, would be those in the top bracket. The poorest Americans, who pay no taxes, would not get any benefits. The rich would make out like bandits. The wealthiest ten percent of Americans would get receive over 60% of Bush’s tax cut while the bottom 60% would get only ten percent. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, the richest 1% would get an average of over $50,000 back every year under Bush’s plan. Middle income families would get an average of only $501 back one one-hundredth the return on the most wealthy. Poorer Americans, those in the bottom 20%, would get only about $50 back.

For nearly $2 trillion you’d think the average family could expect a bigger return. But instead of better school or a smaller national debt and lower interest rates, middle class families can expect about $500 a year. Bush’s biggest backers and donors would be getting their money’s worth, but they are just about the only ones.

Bush claims that his tax cut would vaccinate the economy from future recessions by stimulating growth and entrepreneurship. The rich would benefit right away, the rest of us would benefit later on from a better economy. This is nothing but a return to the trickle-down economics that the GOP brought us in the 1980s. This tax cut is based on the same flawed assumptions and theories that Bush’s father once labeled "Voodoo" economics. It is an economic theory that has been soundly disproved by history on more than one occasion.

The first occasion were the so-called "Reaganomics" of the 1980s. Dean Baker of TomPaine.com was on the money when he wrote that "by virtually every standard, Reaganomics was a failure." Economic growth averaged only 2.7% in the 1980s. That’s about half of the stunning growth rates we’ve seen through the late ‘90s and significantly less that the 4.4% of the 1960s. It’s even less that the 3.2% of the stagflation ‘70s. Job growth was a mere 1.8%, again much less that standard set over the last half decade. For comparison, the rate was 2.8% in the 1960s and 2.5% in the 1970s. Despite that fact that the stated goal of Reaganomics was to create an investment boom, the investment share of national GDP at the height of the Reagan business cycle in 1989 was a full 2.2 percentage points lower that the corresponding point in1979.

The 1980s also were the first time the U.S. ran up big trade deficits. Meanwhile, that wage of a typical worker fell 2.4% in real terms during the decade. Reaganomics did manage to tame inflation; it fell from a high of 12% to less that 4% by 1983. The cost, however, was the worst recession American has seen since World War II and unemployment that peaked at well over 10%. Most infamously, Reaganomics brought us huge budget deficits and an enormous national debt. In the twelve year under Reagan and Bush the elder, the national debt quadrupled. The debt grew at an astounding rate of 26.6% under Reagan. That slowed to 13.5% under Bush, who began reversing Reaganomics in 1991. Under Clinton the average rate has been only 5.4% and is now negative as the country enjoys its biggest surpluses ever.

While the failures of Reaganomics were a significant blow to the trickle-down theory, the results of the deficit reduction package passed by Clinton and Gore in 1993 represent the complete repudiation of the theory. Republicans and trickle-down theorists were in total conniptions over the bill. Newt Gingrich told us "it’s going to shrink the economy, put people out of work and lower tax revenue." Forbes Magazine was so sure that the plan would wreck the U.S. economy that it advised its readers to take their money out of the U.S. and invest it in Asia (oops). Stephen Moore, a long time trickle-down adherent and current W. Bush adviser, said that the bill would "torpedo" the economy. The trickle-down theorists were, to put it mildly, wrong. The 1993 package helped turn the biggest deficits the country had ever seen into the biggest surpluses. This caused interest rates to plunge and allowed businesses and entrepreneurs to raise capital more easily. The result (when added with the hard work and innovation of American workers and businesses) has been the longest sustained economic boom in American History. Gingrich was wrong on all three counts; the economy has grown at a record pace, unemployment has reached all time lows and we now enjoy the biggest surpluses ever. Republicans and trickle-down supporters told us in 1993 that they could not be held responsible for anything that happened thereafter. I say we take them at their word. Rarely has history more thoroughly repudiated an economic theory (Communism is the one other case that comes to mind). Now George W. Bush wants to try it one more time and to abandon the economic policy that has served us so well over the last seven years. Is that what we really want?

The policy of deficit reduction followed by the Clinton administration during the ‘90s was predicated on the belief that bringing interest rates down would unleash the full growth potential off the American population. It was a major success. Bush abandons this philosophy completely. That, however, is not the only problem with his plan; there is a more immediate one as well.

If there is any problem with our economy right now it is that it is going too well. Growth continues to be at record levels. The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates incrementally to try to slow the economy down in an attempt to stop any kind of increases in inflation before they start. This is not the optimal time to dump nearly $2 trillion into the economy. Such a large influx of money into the economy would be inflationary any time. Simple supply and demand tells us that when we increase the supply of an item (in this case money) by such a large amount, its value decreases. In an environment where the economy is already overheated the results could be serious. Inflation would rise significantly. This would force the fed to increase interest rates. This, in turn, would force the stock market lower and could very easily send the economy sliding back into inflation. When people think about how this tax cut will affect them they need to take this into account. Nominally, Bush’s plan may save a hypothetical couple $1000 a year. But the increase in inflation his tax cut will bring will mean that not only will this $1000 be worth less but so will all of the other money the couple makes as well as its savings. The increase in interest rates that will follow will mean that any loans this couple has, be it a mortgage on a home, a car loan or college loans, will cost significantly more. If the couple owns stock they are liable to lose even more money as the market reacts to the higher interest rates. And, of course, if the economy were to turn so far south that unemployment rose, either member of a couple might face a new danger of losing their job. If you consider all the ramifications of Bush’s tax cut, most people will actually end up losing money on the proposition. Don’t take my word for it though. "The Fed wouldn’t let the economic stimulus associated with these tax cuts push the economy into even faster growth" says economist Benjamin Friedman of Harvard. Edward McKelvey of Goldman, Sachs agreed, "to forestall that [kind of inflation], the Fed would almost surely have to tighten" rates by more than half a point. McKelvey authored a study for Goldman that predicted that Bush’s tax cut would cause inflation to rise 0.75 percentage points, a significant increase. He concluded that "Bush’s plan does pose a threat to the [current economic] expansion."

McKelvey and Friedman aren’t the only ones worrying about Bush’s plan. Fed chairman Alan Greenspan condemned the GOP Congress’s tax cut plan last year that was only half the size of Bush’s. He called it premature and economically unsound and told Congress that "the timing is not right." Greenspan also voiced his preference that the surplus be used to pay down the national debt. Fifty economists, including six Nobel Laureates also voiced their displeasure in the GOP’s plan. They wrote Congress saying that such "a massive tax cut that encourages consumption would not be good economic policy…. An ever growing tax cut would claim government resources just when the aging population starts to put substantial stress on Social Security and Medicare." Remember, Greenspan and the Nobel Laureates are talking about Congress’ $800 billion plan which is only half the size of Bush’s! If they are that worried about the Congressional plan imagine their reaction to Bush’s plan.

Of course, there is also the problem of paying for Bush’s massive tax cut. The cut has been estimated at anywhere between $1.3 and $2.1 trillion over ten years and is expected to cost even more over the following decade. The tax cut would eat up almost the entire expected surplus by itself and leave no money left over for education, the military, debt reduction, Social Security or anything else. It is far larger that the cuts proposed by Dole in 1996 or the Republican and Congress in 1998 and 1999. Bush says we can afford it, but he is relying on some very tenuous assumptions on the ability of Congress to hold spending levels down. Congress hasn’t exactly done a good job of this in the past decade or two. As Jonathan Chait of The New Republic says, "Bush’s fiscal style is to assume a bright future, commit every cent to tax cuts and hope that we don’t plunge into the red."

When it comes down to it, this election presents a choice between two entirely opposite approaches to economic policy. On the one hand, we could chose to stay with a policy that has helped turn the largest deficits the nation has ever seen into the largest surpluses, brought us the longest economic expansion in the country’s history and reduced unemployment to record lows. On the other, there is Bush’s plan that would eat up the entire surplus leaving no money to address important problems like education or debt reduction. A plan that would return us to the trickle-down policies that brought us huge deficits and recession. A plan that would lead to an increase in inflation and interest rates and that would likely bring us back to recession. Bush’s tax cut plan would be nothing less than a 180 degree turn in economic policy. Bush’s father once said that if you have to change horses mid-stream you shouldn’t hop on one heading in the opposite direction. He was right.

Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security has drawn rave reviews from many younger voters. It seems like a great idea, right, to let people use a portion of their Social Security payouts as they see fit. As with so many of Bush’s proposals, unfortunately, its beauty is only skin deep. Social Security is a complex and terribly important issue. Bush’s plan would be a major transformation of the most successful American program ever that would effect almost everyone in the country. There would be serious ramifications that Bush has not addressed.

Bush has declined to give many details about his plan. Instead, he tells us, he’ll fill in the details after the election. Still, we know the basics of the concept he is presenting. Bush has always displayed an affinity for plans similar to the one presented by Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist and an adviser to Bush’s campaign this year. Feldstein’s plan, and those like it, would divert 2% of each person’s pay check into private accounts which would be invested into mutual funds or bonds that have traditionally had a higher rate of return than the rock solid U.S. Treasury Bonds that Social Security funds are invested in. 2% way not seem like an awful lot, but it is a full one-sixth of the 12% withheld from paychecks for Social Security. Basically, this plan would divert one-sixth of all Social Security income from the Social Security trust fund and into private accounts. That’s a big change.

Feldstein and Bush maintain that diverting this money into private accounts would increase the rate of return on that money so much that the coming Social Security crunch could be avoided. That’s it. There would be no need to increase taxes to add revenue to Social Security, no cut in benefits and no risk. Almost as if by magic, the problem would be solved. It’s all gain, and no pain. Not surprisingly, such a plan is too good to be true.

There are six major problems with Bush’s partial privatization plan that he glosses over with overly optimistic assumptions or simply ignores completely: transition costs, reduced solvency, lower benefits, little gain, bailout risk and destroying the nature of Social Security. I’ll discuss each of these six problems briefly.

Bush has promised that his plan will not result in reduced benefits for those people collecting benefits now or who will be collecting benefits shortly. That means that Social Security will have to continue paying out benefits at the same rate as it always has. Meanwhile, Bush’s plan would divert one-sixth of Social Security’s income into private accounts. That means the system is going to be running at a huge and costly deficit. Just how much? Michael Tanner of the conservative CATO institute says that Bush’s plan will cost $2.5 trillion over the first 25 years, or $1 trillion over the first ten. The Social Security Administration’s chief actuary officer estimates that the cost will be even higher: $5 trillion over 25 years. Either way, we’re talking about taking over $100 billion a year out of the Social Security trust fund. What’s more, that money would otherwise go towards paying down the national debt, which would reduce future interest payments the government must pay. By not doing so, Bush’s plan will cost another $300 billion over ten years in interest payments. We’re now talking about a total of at least $1.3 trillion over the first ten years. Alone, that would eat up over half of the projected surplus. When added to Bush’s tax cut, the surplus in blown entirely away. That’s over $3 trillion Bush would spend over the next ten years just on his tax cut and on his Social Security plan. With just two proposals Bush would put us another $1 trillion in debt and leave zero money for education, Medicare, paying down the debt or for the military. Where is Bush going to get the $1 trillion plus to pay for his Social Security plan? He won’t tell us. In fact, he wants to leave such mundane details until after the election. Recently, three Social Security experts, including the former Social Security Commissioner under Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, wrote a letter admonishing Bush for his failure to detail how he would pay for his plan. "The arithmetic is simple," the trio wrote. "Where will the $1 trillion come from?"

What is perhaps most strange about Bush’s plan is that, not only does it not solve the problem it set out to address, it actually makes it worse. The problem with Social Security is that the demographics of the country are changing. As the Baby Boomers retire there will be a larger number of people receiving benefits and a smaller number paying for them. That is going to cause the system to eventually go bankrupt. Right now, the system is running a net surplus; it’s bringing in more in Social Security taxes than it is paying out in benefits. This extra revenue goes into the Social Security trust fund and is reserved for future payment of benefits. Without any changes, the system will continue to take in more revenue than it pays out in benefits until 2015. At that point it will begin running a deficit and eating into the large surplus already built up. In 2037 that surplus will be exhausted and the system will be bankrupt.

Since Bush’s plan siphons off between $2.5 trillion and $5 trillion over the next 25 years, the situation becomes more dire. According to the Center of Budget and Public Priorities, under Bush’s plan, with its one-sixth reduction in revenue, the system will fall into the red ten years earlier, in 2005. Bankruptcy will come fourteen years earlier, in 2023 instead of 2037. Now, the theory behind the Bush plan is that the increased rate of return of the money stored in private accounts (as opposed to the money held in the Social Security trust find) will be enough to cover the coming deficits. As I will discuss in a moment, this claim is dubious. Even if it were true, such returns could not be realized until and unless a large surplus of funds was built up in the private accounts. That could not happen for decades, long after the system went bankrupt. Peter Orzay, the president of Sebago Associates, a consulting firm with expertise in the Social Security field, understands that, under Bush’s system, "he’s going to quickly run out of money."

In the end, Bush has not addressed the problems facing Social Security at all. His plan, while dressed up as a revolutionary reform that will "save" the system, will actually cause the system to default over a decade earlier. Social Security experts agree. Unless Bush’s plan is accompanied by a significant reduction in benefits, says Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, "Governor Bush will just be making a bad situation worse." Ron Gebhardtsbauer, a senior fellow of the American Association of Actuaries, agrees, "he not only has not fixed Social Security’s problems, he may have created more."

So what happens in 2005 when Social Security goes into the red? As Burtless noted, the loss of Social Security revenue will have to be offset in some way, either by raising the retirement ages, something Bush has ruled out, raising taxes, which Bush has also ruled out, or by a large cut in the assured benefits paid out to those who will be retiring in the near future. Such a cut will be the only way to avoid a complete meltdown in the system and would not be offset by any income from the private accounts Bush’s plan would set up (those would only begin to pay out benefits when today’s workers begin to retire). "What you are talking about," says Henry Aaron, a former chairman of the national Advisory Council on Social Security, "is a humongous cut in assured benefit income for middle income Americans." Bush himself has not ruled out benefit reductions. When asked if benefits might be reduced to pay for his plan, he responded "that’s all up for discussion."

Even if Bush’s plan weren’t to require immediate benefit cuts (which it almost assuredly will), it will definitely require big benefit cuts for those who retire later. A Century Foundation analysis found that, under Bush’s plan, all workers who are presently 55 years old or younger will face a 40% cut in guaranteed benefits. Their findings are based on Bush’s promise not to raise taxes or cut benefits of current recipients. According to the Century Foundation, massive cuts for future recipients are the only alternative left.

The same study found that the average worker who is currently thirty and who retires at 67 in 2037 will receive 20% less in total retirement income (including assured benefits from Social Security and benefits paid out of his private account created by the Bush plan). Low-income workers would do even worse; they’d get 29% less. Even high-income workers would be slightly worse off; they’d lose 3%.

The argument behind Bush’s plan is that the greater return that the sixth of Social Security revenues diverted to private accounts would enable lower guaranteed payouts. The lower guaranteed payouts would be made up for with larger payouts from the non-guaranteed private accounts. Bush’s stated goal for the private accounts is a 6% rate of return, but this, again, relies on overly optimistic assumptions. Oliver Mitchell, a professor of insurance and risk management at The Wharton School, says that "there is no chance" of realizing the kind of returns Bush envisions. Dean Baker of the Center of Economic and Policy Research says that Bush’s numbers "just don’t add up."

Bush has admitted that his approach could leave workers worse off. In March he said it was "conceivable" that a worker using private accounts could do worse than he would under Social Security and in May he could only respond "maybe, maybe not" when asked if future beneficiaries would get more than they would under the present system.

There isn’t much empirical evidence to go on, but the evidence there is does not bode well for Bush’s plan. In the early 1980s the employees of three Texas counties, Galveston, Matagardo and Brozoria, were allowed to entirely opt out of Social Security and to put their money into private accounts. The rich benefited from this plan handsomely but middle and low-income workers did not fare well at all. For example, a typical low-wage Galveston County employee with a spouse and a 35-year work history would receive $1125 per month from Social Security. The county plan left the same person with only $542 a month.

There are a lot of reasons a plan like Bush’s or Galveston County’s might do less well that expected vs. Social Security. For one thing, Social Security is indexed to inflation, so a sudden rise in inflation, which could decimate a private account, would not harm the return of Social Security. Another problem is that many people simply don’t have the knowledge to do well on the market. They are left out in the cold in Bush’s plan. One more important reason is that administration costs can eat up a significant portion of the profits of a private account.

Administration costs are the fees and other costs that money managing firms charge for administering private investment accounts. Feldstein (and Bush’s) assumption is that such costs would only eat up 0.4% of an account’s value in a year. Independent groups have pegged the number at right around 1.0%, more that twice as much. That may still seem like a small amount, but when it is compounded over decades, it adds up. If Feldstein’s assumption held, administrative costs would eat up about 8% of the total value of an account. Under the more realistic assumption, administration costs would eat up 20% of an account’s total value. That’s a sizeable chunk. Social Security has just about zero administration cost. Aaron says that private accounts like Bush’s simply "waste money on needless administrative costs" and John Mueller, a principal at the market forecasting firm Lehman, Bell, Mueller, Cannon Inc. performed a study that shows that, when administrative costs are taken into account, investors are better off under the current Social Security system.

Even if the average person were better off under Bush’s system (which they wouldn’t be), his system would still present significant problems. The reason is that, while Social Security is totally guaranteed, private accounts involve some element of risk. Thus, even if a majority of Americans did well under the Bush system, there would still be a large number of people who would end up doing very poorly and who would be left with little or no retirement income. One of Bush’s primary economic advisers, Lawrence Lindsay, took his own money out of the market two years ago "because of the inherent risks" of the market and warned his private clients to do the same thing. Now he is trying to sell a plan that would force the entire country to take risks he was not willing to take personally. What happens to people who invest poorly, or who retire right after the market takes a dive? With the inherent risk of the market there are going to be losers and they are not going to be happy. If this is the case there will be enormous pressure on the government insure people against market losses. This would only encourage riskier investments. All of this would likely lead to only one thing: a government bailout that would make everyone forget about the Savings and Loan Crises of the ‘80s. Tanner (from the conservative CATO Institute) thinks Bush’s plan "is an invitation to another Savings and Loan crisis." Hans Riemer, the head of 2030 Action, an advocacy group for young workers, says that "Social Security Privatization, on top of a huge tax cut risks a budget nightmare, a massive Social Security bailout that would make the deficits of the ’80s and ‘90s look like petty change."

Perhaps the biggest problem with Bush’s plan is not that it will cost trillions of dollars, not that it will cause Social Security to become insolvent over a decade faster, not that it will result in lower benefits, not that it could result in a massive bailout, but that it entirely changes the nature of Social Security. The real problem with the Bush approach is that he looks at Social Security in the wrong way. He sees it as an investment. But Social Security is not an investment; it’s insurance. It is not designed to create wealth. It is designed to make sure that seniors don’t starve after they retire. "What privatization means to me," says John Rather of the AARP, "is that the risk is shifted entirely to the individual instead of being shared broadly. The whole point of Social Security is that it is something you can count on where you are not at risk." Allan Sloan of Newsweek puts it even more succinctly, "changing Social Security," he says, "from a plan to make sure that old folks don’t live on cat food into a how-can-you-make-it-in-the-market game would transform it utterly." Bush’s plan, as Sloan says, is bringing that many more ‘old folk’ closer to having to eat cat food.

What many people don’t realize is that, in addition to providing social insurance for all Americans, Social Security is also the single biggest poverty fighting program the U.S. has. Without Social Security fully one half of all retired Americans would live in poverty. That is what Sloan means when he says that Social Security is intended to keep old folks from having to live off of cat food. Social Security provides the country more anti-poverty benefits than all other programs combined. Privatization of Social Security as Bush advocates would reduce or end these anti-poverty benefits.

Social Security plays even another crucial role in our society. It provides for the disabled and survivors of workers who have passed away. Fully one-third of Social Security benefits are paid out to survivors or the disabled. These people would get nothing out of Bush’s private accounts. That’s 13.5 million people who would be left out by Bush’s plan. Just like his Health care plan, Bush’s Social Security plan would dangerously segregate our society between the haves and have-nots. Young, wealthy and healthy workers would reap major benefits from pulling their money out of Social Security while older, poorer and the disabled and survivors would be left without the benefits the rely on to make ends meet.

Bush’s people would argue that they are diverting only one-sixth of Social Security into private accounts and that, while guaranteed benefits would be reduced they would still exist. This would be true, for a while at least. But don’t be fooled. Bush’s partial privatization plan is only the beginning. Theda Skorpal, a professor of Government at Harvard, has it right when she says "I read the proposals of partial private accounts as an entering wedge for allowing the wealthy to withdrawal their taxes from the shared system of Social Security.

Conservatives have opposed Social Security from its inception and continue to do so today. They see it as a socialist system that immorally redistributes wealth and prevents the wealthy from investing more of their money in private markets. To them, as Skorpal says, partial privatization is the entry point which will lead to the eventual abolishment of Social Security entirely. George W. Bush says he is a different kind of Republican but, on this issues at least, there is plenty of evidence that this is exactly what he wants. His top advisers have publicly indicated that they would do away with Social Security if they could. "The current financing structure of Social Security is generationally immoral," says the same Stephen Moore who predicted that the ’93 deficit reduction package would "torpedo" the economy. "Ideally, the entire system should be privatized." Another Bush adviser, John C. Goodman says "people should fund their own retirement income by making regular deposits to IRAs" and that Social Security isn’t needed. With such advisers it’s no shock that Bush himself has let his own desire to see Social Security completely privatized slip. "The government can’t go from one regime to another overnight," Bush said back in March. "It’s going to take a while to transform to a system where private savings accounts are the predominant part of the investment vehicle, and so, this is a step towards a completely different world, an important step."

If Social Security is completely thrown to the wayside some people will do very well. The wealthy and healthy and those with significant experience playing the market will probably end up with bigger nest eggs when they retire. Unfortunately, completely privatizing Social Security will be a disaster for the rest of us. Most Americans will end up with less savings when they retire. Those seniors who rely on Social Security to keep them out of poverty will be left behind as will the millions of disabled people and survivors who count on it for their livelihood. The government would face a bailout crisis that doul cost it hundreds of billion of dollars. Make no mistake, Bush’s plan could easily be the end of Social Security as we know it. That would be a mistake.

The wealthy aren’t the only ones who would benefit under Bush’s plan. As with so many other of Bush’s actions and proposals, the biggest winners would be some of Bush’s biggest contributors: giant brokerage firms and financial institutions. As Robert Auerbach, an economist at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, notes, "all [Bush’s plan] does is feed a lot of commissions to the huge brokerage houses." Where would the money from Bush’s plan go? It would flow directly into accounts at huge investment firms like Goldman, Sachs or Merril Lynch. "If Wall Street could imagine a situation in which it had died and gone to heaven with a bunch of naked ladies," says Robert Reno of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "it would be one in which the government suddenly dumped several million new customers in its lap and guaranteed a huge new revenue stream into eternity. This is what W. is proposing." It just so happens that the kid of firms that would benefit the most from this have given Bush over $3 million for his presidential campaign. In fact, six of Bush’s ten biggest donors stand to benefit rather handsomely from his Social Security proposal.

One of the worst consequences of the trickle-down economics that Ronald Reagan brought us in the 1980s is the legacy of a $4 trillion national debt. His tax cuts reduced revenues so much with no offsetting spending cuts that debt accumulated in record amounts. The debt quadrupled over the twelve years of Presidents Reagan and Bush. Big debts have a real effect on the strength of our economy. Like any loan, our national debt is money that we have borrowed and we have to pay interest on it. The interest payments the government pays on the debt are a substantial portion of our annual budget, in the hundreds of billions. Those are dollars that are simply thrown away because of the financial mismanagement of the 1980s, if we had no debt they could go to education or Social Security or even a tax cut. The ramifications don’t end there. A big debt affects you directly. In borrowing so much money, the government reduces the amount available to be loaned to in the private sector and thus pushes up the interest rates we all must pay for mortgages, car loans or school loans. In 1992 things were only getting worse as the country ran some of the biggest budget deficits ever and the debt continued to grow. That’s why the 1993 deficit reduction package was so important. It managed to eliminate the budget deficit entirely and to begin paying down the debt. This drove interest rates down and allowed investment to soar. This helped drive our economy to its present record state. "Deficit reduction was a very big deal for financial markets," says Richard Berner, the chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter. "I hate to think what would have happened if we hadn’t done it." According to Berner, deficit reduction created a "powerful business investment boom" that pushed the economy forward. The numbers bear him out. Investment spending rose from only 6.1% of GNP in 1991 to 11.4% last year.

We are now at important crossroads. We have the opportunity now to continue on the debt reduction path by committing a portion of the expected surplus to paying off our loans. This would be a huge lift for our economy and would remove a large burden from our shoulders. Keeping deficits away and eliminating the debt would help keep interest rates low and investment high. It would, every year, reduce the amount of money the country would have to throw away on interest payments and free it up for more important uses. Paying down the debt should be a top priority for the next administration. Unfortunately, while George W. Bush pays lip service to this idea, his proposals demonstrate that debt reduction is not even on his radar. In fact, electing Bush would return us to the ways of the 1980s – huge deficits and an ever expanding debt.

Let’s take a look at the numbers for just some of Bush’s proposals. We must, of course, start with the Tax cut. Setting its cost at $1.6 trillion over ten years is a rather conservative estimate. Bush’s tax cut would also adjust something called the alternative minimum tax. This move has been estimated to cost $300 billion over the next ten years. As I noted earlier, Bush’s tax cuts would cost another $365 billion in interest payments on the debt that we would otherwise not have to pay. Bush’s Social Security plan will cost another $1 trillion over ten years and cost another $300 billion in interest payments. Bush’s plan to provide health insurance to low income families will cost a further $150 billion over ten years and his prescription drug plan will cost $198 billion. His proposed long term care plan would cost $15 billion. Bush has yet to set a number for the increase in defense spending he will seek, but he has promised a significant increase. Most estimates but that increase at more than $30 billion a year, so a $300 billion ten-year price tag in a conservative estimate. The cost of the national missile defense system is unknown, but the limited system proposed by the Clinton administration is supposed to cost $60 billion (we all know it will be more). Bush’s system would be far more extensive. A $180 billion estimate is reasonable. As for education, Bush has slotted about $30 billion. All of this adds up, as shown in the table below.

The total is almost four and a half trillion dollars over ten years. That is an incredible amount that Bush has committed in just a few very costly items (these are not all of his proposals, though this list includes the most expensive ones). How will he pay for all of this? Well, Bush claims that the expected budget surplus will be able to cover his massive tax cut and all of his spending proposals. When he does this math, though, he leaves out the transition costs for Social Security (he still refuses to say how he would pay for that) and the costs of his tax cut and his Social Security plan in extra interest payments. He also underestimates the cost of his tax cut and leaves out new defense spending. Using Bush’s math, the expected non Social Security surplus, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will be $2.2 trillion over ten years, is enough. Using real math, Bush spends the surplus twice over and leaves us with over $2 trillion more debt. Even that number is optimistic though. The $2.2 trillion estimate is extremely optimistic. It is based on unrealistic assumptions about the ability of Congress to hold spending down and on how fast the economy will continue to grow. The estimate also includes things like the $400 billion Medicare surplus which aren’t available for new spending but are already committed. A Washington Post analysis calculated that, using more realistic assumptions and excluding things like the Medicare surplus, the real useable surplus over the next ten years will be between $300 and $700 billion. If we commit all $2.2 trillion of the "expected" surplus now in the form of tax cuts and new spending and then find out later that we were overly optimistic in our projections we will face huge budget shortfalls. Bush, of all people, should know this as he has experienced just this phenomenon, if at a smaller scale, in Texas. As Governor, Bush pushed through nearly $3 billion in tax cuts that were financed with Texas’ budget surplus. This year it turned out that many state expenses, like Medicare, were higher than expected. Texas ended up facing a budget shortfall. Bush obviously hasn’t learned his lesson. He is committing so much money in his huge tax cut, Social Security privatization plan and other new spending that, even if all of our most optimistic assumptions hold, we’ll still be looking at over $2 trillion in new debt. If they don’t we could be looking at almost $4 trillion. Is adding $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years really the way we want to go?

One issue that has received little mention this election is the makeup of the Supreme Court. The next president will have an almost unprecedented opportunity to shape the court to his own liking. The present Court is facing questions of age and of health. It is very likely that three, or maybe even four, members of the Court will retire. Chief Justice William Rehnquist is 75. John Paul Stevens is 79. Sandra Day O’Conner is 69. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is 66 and recently had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from her colon. All could retire within the next four years. That means the next president would appoint four new justices. With so many appointments, the next president will be able to make sweeping changes in the court’s ideology and set its direction for decades to come. Republican Senator (and former presidential wannabe) Orrin Hatch claims that the Supreme Court "will prove to be the single most important issue of this next election." He could be right. If Bush wins the, the Court could be set back decades on issues like the separation of church and state, campaign finance laws, civil rights and, of abortion.

Bush, of course, would never broadcast his intention to appoint conservative justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and other important civil rights rulings, but there’s little doubt that this is what he will do. Bush will tell us nothing more than that he will appoint "strict constructionists" to the Court. He won’t, however, tell us what his definition of a "strict constructionist" is. Despite his attempts to be deliberately vague, there is ample evidence to suggest that Bush will appoint hard-core right-wingers.

First of all, Bush has been candid in his support for Anthony Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who he says are his favorite Justices. He has also demonstrated repeatedly his disdain for David Souter, an appointment of his father who turned out to be more moderate than expected. Scalia and Thomas are, without question, the two most conservative members of the Court. They are so conservative that three other justices (Souter, Ginsberg and Stevens) called their opinion on the meaning of the 1967 Voting Rights Act "radical" and claimed that, were their opinion the majority, it would have overturned at least 28 Supreme Court decisions on civil rights.

There are reasons besides Bush’s obvious personal preference to believe that he would appoint right-wingers to the Bench. For one thing, Bush has had to make concessions to the far right to win his party’s nomination (Remember Bob Jones?) and he will again need the far right’s strong support to win the presidency. Randal Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard, believes that Bush will have to make some major concessions to the right and that "one of those concessions will likely be a major influence in the selection of judges, especially to the Supreme Court." Moreover, the past two decades have seen the pool of Republican lawyers and jurists move significantly to the right as Thomas and Scalia have dominated the GOP judicial scene and fed a backlash against the "betrayal" of Souter ("No More Souters" is the right’s new rallying cry). For the most part, the only experienced jurists Bush has to choose from are decidedly conservative.

Who would Bush chose? The general consensus is that his top two choices would be J. Michael Luttig and Emilo Garza. Luttig is a Scalia protégé through and through. He was a clerk for Scalia and headed the Justice Department Office of Leagal Council just like Scalia. He sits on the 4^th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals which is considered the nation’s most aggressively conservative court. In the past he has come out against the Violence Against Women act and has repeatedly supported restrictions on abortion. Garza was a Reagan appointee to the U.S. District Court in Texas and a Bush (Sr.) appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals. He has been strong in his opposition to Roe v. Wade, saying that the Court "erred mightily" with the ruling and that the ruling was "inimical to the Constitution."

Right now the Court is split right down the middle on abortion. A switch of one vote could overturn Row v. Wade. If Bush appoints Lutting, Garza and/or other justices like Thomas or Scalia, Row v. Wade will be overturned. There’s no doubt about it. Think there is? Just listen to Julie Schmit-Albin of the Nebraska Right to Life Committee. "Bush has to win," she says. "That’s our only plan."

A woman’s right to chose won’t be the only freedom endangered if Bush is elected. A Scalia and Thomas led court would curb many other important Freedoms. The duo have already ruled to exempt the election of state judges from all provisions of the Voting Rights Act (which basically ensures the right of everyone to vote). They have ruled to allow sex discrimination in jury selection and to allow blatant discrimination by government agencies against gays. A Bush win would mean a step back in terms of civil rights for gays, minorities and women.

Bill Bennett is the GOP’s unofficial morals czar. After serving as the head of the Department of Education under Reagan and as the nation’s Drug Czar under Bush (Sr.), Bennett has made his mark by defending true "moral values" in the face of attacks from all quarters. His primary target has been, of course, the Clinton-Gore administration and the Democratic Party. They are somewhat ironic targets. In 1992, after twelve years of Reagan-Bush-Quayle, Bennett wrote "Index of Cultural Indicators," a book that lamented the increase, over the previous decade or so, of things like crime, divorce, child poverty, abortions and out-of-wedlock births. To Bennett, it seemed that the apocalypse would soon be upon us. "These [things]," he said, "could lead to the decline and fall of the American Republic." That is some sharp implicit criticism of the last two Republican administrations – if things were so bad that the very being of the United States was threatened then Regan, Bush and Quayle must have been doing something wrong. The curious thing is that Bennett has nothing but for praise for the previous administrations and nothing but scorn for the present one. Why is it curious? Virtually all of the social problems Bennett lamented about in 1992 have improved dramatically over the past eight years.

Under Clinton and Gore crime has seen it longest and deepest decline in decades. In fact, crime is now at a 25 year low. Violent crime decreased this year to its lowest level since statistics were first recorded in 1973. Violent crime has fallen a full 50% since 1993 after rising 25% under presidents Reagan and Bush.

The number of children living in poverty rose from 12.5 million to 15.7 million under presidents Bush and Reagan. Under Clinton-Gore, that number has declined steadily. In fact, 1993 to 1997 saw the largest 4-year decline since the 1960s. Welfare rolls, which rose 30% under Reagan and Bush, have fallen 46% in the last 7 and ½ years.

Teen birthrates have fallen to their lowest levels since statistics were first recorded 60 years ago, dropping 20% in the 1990s. Abortion and out-of-wedlock births are also down in the past 7 ½ years.

Then, of course, we have the economy. The twelve years of Reagan, Bush and Quayle and the eight of Clinton and Gore are like night and day. I’ve discussed the failures of Reaganomics above: little economic growth and even less job growth. Unemployment peaking at well over 10%. Huge budget deficits and a quadrupling of the national debt. Compare that to what we have seen over the last eight years: the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. The lowest unemployment we have ever seen. The largest budget surpluses ever. Economic growth off the charts.

Knowing all of Bush’s plans, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, or even down right scared, of the prospects of a second Bush presidency. Even if we didn’t know all that, however, why would we want to reverse all of the gains we have made over the past eight years and return to the policies that served us so poorly in the past?

As bad as Bush’s past has been, if he is elected President the future, both his and ours, will be even worse. Many people say this election doesn’t matter, that there is no difference between the two candidates. That is simply not true. There are stark contrasts on almost every issue and, unfortunately for Bush, he is on the wrong side of most. His tax plan is simply a recipe for disaster – it will cause our booming to reverse its course and it will bring us back to the days of huge deficits and an even bigger national debt. His Social Security plan is a recipe for an even bigger disaster – it will add trillions to our national debt and could force millions into poverty while benefiting most people very little. Meanwhile, our children will miss out on money that could have been spent on education and their schools could face the unpleasant prospect of either becoming glorified Kaplan centers or losing out on federal funding. Bush’s voucher plan will take even more much needed money out of the public school system. His health care plan is a hand out to his buddies in business that will cost us even more money and do almost nothing to reduce the rolls of uninsured in this country. His tax cut, Social Security plan and spending proposals will waste the entire surplus and spend trillions more. Maybe most important, a Bush victory would mean a Supreme Court packed with hard line conservatives. That would mean an end to a woman’s right to chose among other things. A Bush presidency would have real costs for this country. We can’t afford it.