"The public is not laughing," commented a White House official. Newsday, the New
York tabloid, went with the headline READ MY FLIPS. The New York Times revived the
label that Bush resented most: for the newspaper of record, Bush was "a political wimp."
A senior GOP political consultant noted that "the difference is that Reagan had principles
and beliefs. This guy has no rudder." In the opinion of Newsweek, "Bush took no stand on
principle and didn't seem to know what he wanted....He made incomprehensible jokes.
He was strangely eager to please even those who were fighting him, and powerless to
punish defectors. As in the bad old days, he looked goofy." [fn 52]
The haggling went on into the third week of October, and then into the fourth. Would it
last to Halloween, to permit a macabre night of the living dead on the Capitol? Newt
Gingrich told David Brinkley on "This Week" of October 21 that most House
Republicans were prepared to vote against any plan to increase taxes, totally disregarding
the wishes of Bush. Senator Danforth of Missouri complained, "I am concerned and a lot
of Republicans are concerned that this is becoming a political rout." At this point the
Democrats wanted to place a 1% surtax on all income over 41 million, while the GOP
favored reducing the deductions for the rich. In yet another flip-flop, Bush had conceded
on October 20 that he would accept an increase in the top income tax rate from 28% to
31%. By October 24, a deal was finally reached which could be passed, and the next day
Bush attempted to put the best possible face on things by assembling the bruised and
bleeding Republican Congressional leadership, including the renegade Gingrich, for
another Rose Garden ceremony.
The final budget plan set the top income tax rate at 31%, and increased taxes on gasoline,
cigarettes, airline tickets, increased Medicare payroll taxes and premiums, while cutting
Medicare benefit payouts and government payments to farmers. Another part of the
package replaced the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings once a year sequester threat with a
"triple, rolling sequester" with rigid spending caps for each of the three categories of
defense, foreign aid, and discretionary domestic spending, and no transfers permitted
among these. The entire apparatus will require super-majorities of 60 votes to change in
the future. Naturally, this package was of no use whatever in deficit reduction, given the
existence of an accelerating economic depression. In Bush's famous New World Order
speech on September 11, he had frightened the Congress with the prospect of a deficit of
$232 billion. In October of 1991, it was announced that the deficit for the fiscal year
ending September 31, 1991, the one that was supposed to show improvement, had come
in at $268.7 billion, the worst in all history. Predictions for the deficit in the year
beginning on October 1, 1991 were in excess of $350 billion, guaranteeing that the 1991
record would not stand long. Bush's travail of October, 1990 had done nothing to
improve the picture.
Bush's predicament was that the Reaganomics of the 1980's (which had been in force
since the period after the Kennedy assassination) had produced more than a depression:
they had engendered the national bankruptcy of the United States. That bankruptcy was
now lawfully dismembering the Reagan coalition, the coalition which Bush had still been
able to ride to power in 1988. Since Bush refused to replace the suicidal, post-industrial