"Running on Empty" by Peter G. Peterson

Though he remains an investment banker by day, for the past dozen years Peterson has mainly been occupied as the nation's unofficial fiscal Cassandra, a man who considers it his duty to puncture any temporary good feeling with warnings of the winter ahead. In 1992, he co-founded the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group calling for "fiscal responsibility" in Washington. Since then, he has written several books outlining the coming entitlement disaster, each one carrying a more urgent title than the last: "On Borrowed Time" was followed by "Facing Up" and then the more plaintive "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?" In 1999, in "Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America -- and the World," Peterson seemed to put his foot down: "It's time to steer clear of feel-good policies we know are wrong," he lectured. "It's time to quit serving up a delicious assortment of free lunches -- and calling it reform. It's time to engage the real challenges of an aging society."

Of course, nobody in power did anything to engage such challenges, and in the face of the overwhelming legislative apathy, Peterson could do only what he's done before -- write another book. In "Running on Empty," he is more anxious than ever -- sometimes, it should be noted, to the point of irritation. Peterson can come off as a know-it-all grandfather, an eat-your-spinach type whose prudence and rationality and nostalgia for a time when American politicians acted a lot more maturely bring the reader to the brink of wondering, Will this guy ever let loose? Can't he abide any of the pleasures of big government, or the thrill of a smaller tax bill? Some liberals will no doubt think him unfeeling, seeing as he regularly rails against the excesses of federal entitlements. Conservatives will call him untrue, a traitor to the cause of tax cuts, a RINO, or "Republican in name only," the label that tax cutters have come to apply with devastating effectiveness to any Republican who questions the prudence of gutting the government.

But Peterson's harsh tone is easy to forgive. Indeed, it is a delight: Somebody needs to teach our leaders a bit of responsibility, and Peterson, who is both well-schooled in the facts of his case as well as a gifted and relentless rhetorician, is exactly the sort of lecturer we need. He sounds like a grown-up, and if he's sometimes a bit too exasperated, it is only because the kids have behaved so badly.

As Peterson sees it, the politician who's behaved worst of all is Bush, for whom Peterson once had high hopes. In addition to advising his aides during the campaign, Peterson also met Bush a couple of times before he became president, and he implored the candidate to make fiscal reform the mission of his presidency. Reform is a "moral issue," Peterson told Bush during one of their meetings. After guiding the candidate through the official projections of the huge payroll taxes and debt that tomorrow's generation would inherit from today's, Peterson writes, "I told him that if looking out for our children's future was a definitive test of our morality, then long-term tax cuts, particularly for us fat cats in the room, should wait until entitlement reform had been completed." This was apparently not something that Bush wanted to hear. Bush "visibly stiffened, as though hit in the gut," Peterson writes. "I don't think tax cuts are immoral," Bush replied, ending the conversation.

"It was there and then that I realized that to George W. Bush, tax cuts were an obligation driven by faith, not a policy guided by evidence," Peterson writes. In this belief, Bush is representative of just about every member of the modern Republican Party (the exceptions are John McCain, who adoringly blurbs Peterson's book, and a few other blue-state Republicans in the Senate). To Peterson's chagrin, the post-Reagan GOP has wholly abandoned the party's age-old obsession with "fiscal responsibility" in favor of what Peterson calls "an indulgent fiscal philosophy" that cuts taxes without any care for the consequences. "For 'supply-side' Republicans, the pursuit of lower taxes has evolved into a religion, indeed a theology that discards any objective evidence that violates the faith."

Next Page: Supply-siders are sometimes right -- but when the Clinton tax hike of '93 fueled an economic boom, they were wrong big-time

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