offspring. WIC underwent savage cuts during the first year of the Bush regime, causing
many needy women who sought its benefits to be turned away and denied even such
modest quantities of surplus cheese, powdered milk, and orange juice as the program
provides. [fn 10]
As the depression deepened, Bush had only one idea: to reduce the capital gains tax rate
from 28% to 15%. This was a proposal for a direct public subsidy to the vulture legions
of Kravis, Liedtke, Pickens, Milken, Brady, Mosbacher, and the rest of Bush's apostles of
greed. The Bushmen estimated that a capital gains tax reduction in this magnitude would
cost the Treasury some $25 billion in lost receipts over 6 years, a crass underestimate.
These funds, argued the Bushmen, would then be invested high-tech plant and
equipment, creating new jobs and new production. In reality, the funds would have
flowed into bigger and better leveraged buyouts, which were still being attempted after
the crash of the junk bond market with the failure of the United Airlines buyout in
October, 1989. But Bush had no serious interest in, or even awarenss of, commodity
production. His policies had now brought the country to a brink of a financial panic in
which 75% of the current prices of all stocks, bonds, debentures, mortgages, and other
financial paper would be wiped out.
Not quite halfway through his dismal first hundred days, Bush was moved to defend
himnself against charges that he was presiding over a debacle. On day 45 of the new
regime, Bush told reporters that he had talked on the phone to a certain Robert W. Blake,
an oilman of Lubbock, Texas, the city which Neil Bush and John Hinckley had called
home for a while in the late 1970's. Blake had allegedly told Bush that "all the people in
Lubbock think things are going great." Armed with this testimonial, Bush defended his
handling of the presidency: "It's not adrift and there isn't malaise," he said, answering
columnists who had suggested that the country had fallen through a time warp back to the
days of Jimmy Carter. "So I would simply resist the clamor that nothing seems to be
bubbling around, that nothing is happening. A lot is happening. Not all of it good, but a
lot is happening." Bush described his oilman friend Blake as "a very objective
spokesman," and stated this his personal rule was "never get all too uptight about stuff
that hasn't reached Lubbock yet." [fn 11]
If there was a constant note in Bush's first year in office, it was a callously flaunted
contempt for the misery of the American people. During the spring of 1989, the Congress
passed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage in interstate commerce from
$3.55 per hour to $4.55 per hour by a series of increments over three years. This
legislation would even have permitted a subminimum wage that could be paid to certain
newly hired workers over a 60-day training period. Bush vetoed this measure because the
$4.55 minimum wage was 30 cents an hour higher than he wanted, and because he
demanded a subminimum wage for all new employees for the first six months on the job,
regardless of their previous experience or training. On June 14, 1989, the House of
Representatives failed to override this veto, by a margin of 37 votes. (Later, Bush signed
legislation to raise the minimum wage to $4.25 per hour over two years, with a
subminimum training wage applicable only to teenagers and only during the first 90 days