According to the NYTimes, George “Dubya” Bush is going to poke his head out of his secure location and predict… well, six more weeks of heavy weather for Romney, from the sound of it:
For the first time since leaving office three and a half years ago, Mr. Bush is advancing a variety of ideas about how to jump-start economic growth by restructuring taxes, expanding trade, encouraging innovation, fixing immigration and overhauling Social Security. He wrote the foreword for the book, a collection of essays from an array of economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, and he proposes a national goal of expanding the economy by 4 percent a year on a sustained basis.
“The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs,” to be unveiled by the former president in Dallas on Tuesday and published by Crown Business, is neither campaign template nor partisan screed. It is a wonky paean to free enterprise.
It is also the next step in a gradual return to the public stage by a president who has largely remained out of the limelight since turning over the White House to President Obama….
Leaving aside, for the moment, snark about how we’d only be sure Bush wrote the foreword if it were in crayon, I misdoubt the patented Romney “Etch-A-Sketch” campaign really wants to change the subject on the bobblehead shows from his personal financial shenanigans at Bain to the GOP’s vastly larger financial shenanigans during the Cheney Regency. Sure, last time you trusted us we blew up the financial world, but this time, our figurehead CEO is an experienced professional at blowing up other peoples’ financial worlds! — there’s an ad campaign for the OFA scriveners to dream about.
Okay, maybe the individual essays in this “wonky paean” actually have useful information…
… The ideas in the book include lowering corporate tax rates, shifting away from taxing income to taxing consumption and property, promoting innovation by letting professors keep gains from their research, expanding free-trade pacts with Japan and other countries, refocusing immigration policy to recruit more high-skill workers, and expanding the work force by lowering payroll taxes on employees with children.
A goal of 4 percent growth would be ambitious for a country whose annual growth has averaged 3.2 percent since 1948 and is currently below 2 percent. But the difference would have a huge impact; had the country’s economy grown 4 percent a year since 1948, it would be 50 percent larger today. Higher growth would help reduce debt by producing more tax revenue…
And if only the power of postive economic thinking allowed me to wish myself eight inches taller, it would have a “huge impact” on improving my height-to-weight ratio. But that’s not gonna happen, either, and it’s not for lack of wishing.
Apart from the determined ignoring of reality, what’s on the agenda for the end of the weekend?
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