This post first appeared at BillMoyers.com
Editor’s Note:
Economist Bruce Bartlett is a man of fierce intellectual independence — and courage, too. Telling the truth about Republican economic policies during the George W. Bush presidency got him fired as a senior fellow at a conservative think tank and brought to an end his long career as an esteemed GOP “insider.”
On the right he could boast a gold-standard resume as an architect of supply-side economics and “trickle-down” taxes with Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY), a central figure in the “Reagan Revolution” as a White House aide, a director of the Joint Economic Committee and a senior Treasury Department official in the days of George H.W. Bush. But then he rocked Republican elites and movement conservatives alike with a book that went, in their eyes, beyond truancy to treason: Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. You would have thought Bartlett had been convicted of blasphemy in Saudi Arabia, where atheists can be punished with a thousand lashes, jail sentence, or worse. He next revised his own earlier ideas with some second opinions in The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. Cast now into outer darkness beyond the Beltway, Bartlett became become a prolific writer and commentator. He produced a third book on The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It and What It Will Take. His fourth will appear in October: The Truth Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Separating Facts from Lies and Stopping Fake News in Its Tracks. If you have the stomach for it, watch him get pilloried by the “alt-right” media and Fox News.
Just last weekend Bruce Bartlett rattled the cages again with an essay in Politico under the headline, “Trump Is What Happens When a Political Party Abandons Ideas.” In his latest contribution to BillMoyers.com, he takes on the Democrats.
— Bill Moyers
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