It has been more than 16 years since the second Bush of the father-son political dynasty left office, but the damage done by these two men continues to affect the lives not only of people in the country but around the world. Unfortunately, in the present age of Donald Trump, both Democrats and never-Trump Republicans are rehabilitating their disastrous presidencies, asking us to forget their legacies of death and destruction. Over the next two weeks, this column will remind our readers of the carnage these two presidents left behind.
George H.W. Bush
The 41st President of the United States was the first sitting vice president to be elected since Martin Van Buren won the presidency in 1836. Interestingly, both men were one-term presidents, as the nation was wracked by economic recessions while they were in office. (To his credit, Van Buren refused to authorize federal intervention even though it cost him politically).
Bush won the presidency by defeating Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in a rather lackluster campaign that truly earned the spoof debate featured on “Saturday Night Live.” During his campaign, Bush promised to be the “environmental president” and the “education president,” and during his term in office he helped to further centralize education and his environmental policies twisted federal environmental law to vastly expand environmental regulations in ways that would have tragic consequences for ordinary property owners.
On the economic front, the man who ran for office on the slogan, “Read my lips; no new taxes,” raised income tax rates and signed into law the infamous “luxury tax” which created so much havoc that it was repealed by a Democratic Party-dominated Congress in 1993. And then there is the Gulf War, which ultimately led to the so-called War on Terror pursued by Bush’s son, George W. Bush, that has left behind a wake of death and destruction as well as some of the worst refugee crises since World War II.
This article covers the different aspects of the George H.W. Bush presidency from the draconian environmental policies that resulted in questionable criminal charges against people accused of violating environmental law to Bush’s tax policies and the “crown jewel” of his less-than-illustrious presidency, the Gulf War. Given the damage he created, the voters made a wise choice when they denied him a second term.
The “Environmental President”
As a true believer in centralization, Bush supported revamping the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), making it very aggressive in pursuing the administration’s environmental goals. Indeed, his presidency would leave an environmental legacy, but one that made this country and its economy and people worse off.
The centerpiece of the Bush environmental presidency was the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1991, which aggressively attacked the non-problem of so-called “acid rain.” William Reilly’s EPA claimed that rainfall in the East was so acidic, thanks to coal-burning electric power plants, that it was destroying lakes, rivers, and forests. However, several thousand scientists actively researching the problem under the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), came up with different conclusions, namely, that there really was no crisis.
The EPA’s response to actual science (versus the wild claims by environmentalists) was to attack the scientists and claim their research was tainted. A scientist who showed conclusively that acid rain was not destroying lakes and streams was especially targeted by EPA officials, who destroyed his career despite the fact that his research was impeccable, a story I chronicled in a 1992 article in Reason Magazine.
During the campaign, Bush declared that there would be “no net loss of wetlands,” which ultimately meant increasing the acreage of wetlands by changing the definition of a wetland. The EPA also expanded via regulatory fiat that a designated wetland would be classified as being part of the “navigable waters on the U.S.,” which essentially nationalized nearly every puddle or wet spot. Unfortunately, a number of people found themselves being prosecuted or threatened with prosecution for being “polluters” for engaging in activities like farming.
Not satisfied with imposing heavy new costs on producers through more environmental regulations, Bush also set the stage for out-of-control wildfires in western forests. In the name of protecting the Northern Spotted Owl, the Bush administration set off millions of acres of forests from logging, devastating communities that depended upon logging and producing lumber. As noted in The Hill:
The shift toward federal forest “non-management” has resulted in a dangerous build-up of forest fuels that are contributing to today’s mega-fires. According to a 20-year monitoring report on the Northwest Forest Plan published in 2015, over 80 percent of spotted owl habitat loss during this period was due to wildfire and forest disease, not timber harvest. During Oregon’s disastrous 2020 wildfire season, over 560 square miles of suitable nesting and roosting spotted owl habitat burned up.
“Read My Lips”
As noted earlier, Bush reneged on his campaign promise not to raise taxes and facing a Democratic Congress, agreed to new tax hikes in exchange for phantom cuts in federal spending. The federal deficit during a recession in 1990 hit more than $200 billion, so in response, the government continued to spend and enacted job-killing taxes.
Along with hiking the top income tax rate from 28 percent to 33 percent, Bush also agreed to a “luxury tax” of 10 percent on so-called luxury items like cars costing more than $30,000, boats over $100,000, furs, and private planes. However, the tax turned out to be a disaster:
The taxes took in $97 million less in their first year than had been projected — for the simple reason that people were buying a lot fewer of these goods. Boat building, a key industry in…Maine and Massachusetts, was particularly hard hit. Yacht retailers reported a 77% drop in sales that year, while boat builders estimated layoffs at 25,000.
Returning to Making War
While the Bush presidency was disastrous on many fronts, the worst thing POTUS 41 did was to take the US Armed Forces to war over what began as a diplomatic dispute between Iraq and Kuwait. However, invading Iraq was not the only act of military aggression by the Bush White House.
In December 1989, after a federal grand jury in Miami indicted Panama’s president, Manuel Noriega, for drug trafficking, US forces invaded Panama in what the US called “Operation Just Cause.” Noriega surrendered to US forces and served time in a US federal prison. Before he surrendered, however, 23 US servicemen were killed, with 150 Panama troops and more than 500 civilians also dying.
Bush’s operations in Panama loosened the bounds on US intervention elsewhere, leading to the Gulf War, which would unleash its own set of long-term horrors. In August 1990, Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait on orders by Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein. The cause was a dispute about oil drilling by Kuwait that allegedly violated OPEC quotas and alleged “slant drilling” under the Iraq-Kuwait border.
Kuwait political operatives soon planted false stories in the media about alleged Iraqi atrocities. Bush likened Saddam to Hitler himself, and the specter of Iraq invading Saudi Arabia or other Arab nations dominated stories in the western media. As Murray Rothbard pointed out, the man Bush called the next “Hitler” had been a US ally for more than a decade.
After building up troops and materiel in Saudi Arabia right outside the Iraq border, Bush ordered an attack on Baghdad in January 1991, as US missiles and bombs pounded Iraq’s capital. It didn’t take long to destroy bridges, sewer plants, and other aspects of the city’s infrastructure, all in the name of hitting “military targets.”
The war itself lasted little more than a week, as the US-led coalition routed Iraqi troops and forced Iraq’s government to sign a peace agreement. The agreement left Saddam in power, and the US would finally remove him more than a decade later in George W. Bush’s administration. Crowed Bush: “It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
Unfortunately, the US victory over a hapless foe only whetted the appetite for more US military interventions elsewhere. And when Bush’s son, George W. Bush won the White House a decade later, he would push US interventions into a misnamed “War on Terror” which would lead to disasters at home and abroad.
Conclusion
For all of Bush’s campaign rhetoric that he was going to take on the system, he never rose above what he had been for much of his life: a Washington apparatchik. Even though he served under Ronald Reagan for eight years, he was convinced that Reagan’s presidency had violated Washington’s orthodoxy and was determined to right the ship in his term.
As Murray Rothbard wrote in 1988, Reagan’s two terms probably were not the “revolution” his supporters have claimed, but nonetheless, whatever he did that didn’t square with Washington orthodoxy would have seemed heretical to a Beltway figure like Bush. In the end, the Bush presidency left this country worse off than when he began and set numerous bad precedents that still are harming our body politic. At best, one might have hoped that POTUS 41 was irrelevant and forgettable, but, instead, he was both relevant and memorable for all the wrong reasons.
