AHC: Pres. Bush stands pat with second tax cut in 2002, moves on to other domestic issues?

President George W. Bush signed the Jobs Creation and Worker Assistant Act (JCWAA) on March 9, 2002, which was his second tax cut. In OTL, he moved on to still more tax cuts.

But what if he would have left well enough alone and moved on to other domestic issues?
 
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SsgtC

Banned
The deficit and national debt wouldn't have gotten nearly as big as they did during his term. Once Obama is elected I'm not sure. It could have helped keep the debt from exploding the way it did, or it could have made it worse by giving Congress more money to play with making them even more reckless.

President George W. Bush signed the Jobs Creation and Worker Assistant Act on March 9, 2002, which was his second tax cut. In OTL, he moved on to still more tax cuts.

But what if he would have left well enough alone and moved on to other domestic issues?
 
And maybe . . .

If there had been more space left, we could have had a more aggressive Keynesian approach in response to the 2008 financial institution meltdown.

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You have to change his post 911 thinking that any fighting other then special ops stuff would be over in a year to year and a half from the date given in the op and that the 2004 election would be decided on the economy as 1992 was decided. The argument that the wars would be longer and that increased war spending would be stimulative would be the only thing to change his underlying economic and political calculus.
 
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. . . change his post 911 thinking that any fighting other then special ops stuff would be over in a year to year and a half . . .
Maybe Daddy Bush could tell him, hey, these guys are giving you the best case scenario. These guys meaning Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, etc.

And like a lot of things in life, it might take Daddy Bush plus one other person telling him. Often, it takes two people telling us something before we start to believe it, and maybe that's rational in a certain way. I mean, I don't want to be changing my plans just because one person is telling me something.

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PS and Oh how this promise of "Read my Lips, No New Taxes" has echoed through American politics!!! A promise Bush, Sr. probably didn't need to make in the 1988 election, and then in the Fall of 1990 as part of a budget deal with Congressional Democrats during the ramp up to the first Persian Gulf War, one in which he probably had pretty good reason to break. But that's not exactly the way it played out.
 
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https://books.google.com/books?id=q...sive upward climb from 2002 to 2008 "&f=false

' . . . oil prices went on an irregular but impressive upward climb from 2002 to 2008 because of the Iraq war, other political issues in the Middle East and elsewhere, problems with refining capacity, and surging energy demand from China. . . '
This is the more straightforward type of stagflation in which the supply curve shifts inward. There are of course more muddled and complex forms.

And as with any sputtering economy, yes, unfortunately war provides a stimulus, as well as infrastructure and tax cuts on the more positive side of the ledger.

So again, if President Bush had decided to leave well enough alone and not seek more tax cuts after the above 2002 JCWAA, if he had taken the attitude that we're going to skip tax cuts one year and hold it in reserve for the next year if needed, what effect on the U.S. economy and/or political energy for other domestic initiatives?
 
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