Last night, Brian Williams asked Romney to distinguish his approach to economic growth from Bush’s. The answer was a mere recapitulation of his plans (“Well, let me describe — actually, there are five things that I believe are necessary to get this economy going … ”). I won’t reprint the entire answer, but Romney did not make the slightest attempt to distinguish his approach from Bush’s. Of course that is because it’s the same thing! Every single idea Romney listed — low taxes, free trade, less regulation, developing energy, etc. — was part of Bush’s program.
Now, the usual Republican answer here, on how their approach will succeed where Bush’s failed, is to shout, spending! Romney promises to cut it. Bush also promised to cut it, but didn’t. I don’t think this really answers the main objection — lower spending may help the long-term budget picture, but the policies Republicans most directly associate with economic growth are taxes, regulation, and energy. And here Romney really is proposing the exact same policies as Bush.
But the surprising thing is that Romney didn’t even have that, or
any other handy answer to the question. This is a pretty bad political
messaging slip-up, but it also indicates a larger problem: Republicans
haven’t really internalized the degree to which Bush’s policies truly
failed to produce strong economic growth. They blame him for letting
spending grow too high, and they recognize that the crash was a bad
thing, but conservative rhetoric almost uniformly fails to acknowledge
that even pre-crash growth under Bush was absolutely miserable.
And so conservatives have engaged in no critical examination whatsoever of their belief that the combination of low marginal taxes, lax regulation, free trade, and drill-here-drill-now will necessarily result in rapid growth.
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