"Obituaries from the Future:
Former President George W. Bush Dead at 72"
Greil Marcus, CityPages
Policy Review, October 5, 2018 — George W. Bush, the
43rd president of the United States, died today at
Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. He was 72. The
cause of death was announced as heart failure.
Mr. Bush's always controversial presidency left behind
a changed nation and a changed world. Taking office in
2001 after a disputed election settled only by a 5-4
decision by a bitterly divided Supreme Court, and
decisively reelected in 2004, President Bush led the
United States into four wars, oversaw the dismantling
of Social Security and Medicare, and enforced a drastic
shrinking of elementary, secondary, and collegiate
education.
He spearheaded the transformation of
President Bill Clinton's budget surpluses of 1999 and
2000 into permanent deficits of more than a trillion
dollars a year, thus profoundly reducing the amount of
capital available to address the needs of the vast
majority of citizens and inhibiting the creation of new
jobs with any promise of advancement or financial
security, while at the same time pursuing tax
reductions that increased the differences between the
income and assets of, in his own terminology, "owners"
and "pre-owners" of "the American ownership society" to
extremes almost beyond measure. When he left office,
taxation of personal and corporate incomes, while still
legally extant, had been effectively replaced by a new
payroll tax, so that almost all investment,
inheritance, and interest income was left tax-free.
