{"id":783,"date":"2009-11-14T19:04:08","date_gmt":"2009-11-15T00:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/?p=783"},"modified":"2009-11-14T19:04:10","modified_gmt":"2009-11-15T00:04:10","slug":"the-hubris-of-the-trillion-dollar-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/2009\/11\/the-hubris-of-the-trillion-dollar-man\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hubris of the Trillion-Dollar Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.cato.org\/~r\/Cato-at-liberty\/~3\/cI191T_xNQw\/\">The Hubris of the Trillion-Dollar Man<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Former President <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtontimes.com\/news\/2009\/nov\/13\/bush-warns-of-too-much-government\/?feat=home_headlines\">George W. Bush<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>said Thursday that America must resist the \u201ctemptation\u201d to allow the government to take over the private sector, taking a subtle shot at his Democratic successor by warning that too much state intervention and protectionism will squelch the economic recovery\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs the world recovers, we will face a temptation to replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector with the blunt instruments of government spending and control. History shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement, but too much,\u201d said Mr. Bush.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Um, what? The president who<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>expanded federal spending by more than a trillion dollars a year, <em>before<\/em> his disastrous last hundred days<br \/>\nfederalized education<br \/>\nlaid out \u201ca <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cato.org\/pub_display.php?pub_id=3351\">smorgasbord<\/a> of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington.\u201d<br \/>\nprotected the steel, agriculture, and textile industries from foreign competition<br \/>\nbacked farm bills with lavish subsidies for producers<br \/>\ncreated the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson<br \/>\nbailed out Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, and dozens of other banks<br \/>\nprovided government support for mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and other consumer debt, and<br \/>\nbailed out Chrysler and General Motors in direct defiance of Congress\u2019s refusal to do so<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>now says that his successor is about to \u201creplace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector\u201d with \u201ctoo much government involvement\u201d? Shouldn\u2019t President Bush be doing penance in a monastery somewhere, rather than embarrass the free-market cause by pretending that he wasn\u2019t the biggest-government president in decades?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This: The Hubris of the Trillion-Dollar Man: Former President George W. Bush said Thursday that America must resist the \u201ctemptation\u201d to allow the government to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pekNN-cD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions\/784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}