Editorials /Dead Wrong/The Mysterious Death of Vince Foster
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E verything Bill Clinton believes about the economy is wrong. He believes that by raising taxes he will cut the deficit. That will lower interest rates. This will spur economic activity. But of...
...The increase will come from the rest of us or not at all...
...With Clinton's huge tax increase now being negotiated in Washington, then, there will come no great increase in revenue from the rich...
...Why this confusion...
...He believes that government can create prosperity...
...In the days that immediately followed Foster's death, the president and hisaides all reported their amazement and, of course, their grief...
...For several years I have whizzed by it en route to my home...
...In fact, the wealthy paid $6.5 billion less in taxes in 1991, and the middle class paid $3.3 billion more...
...In 1992, candidate Clinton believed we were living through a prolonged recession...
...According to IRS reports, those making $200,000 or more paid 6.1 percent less in federal income tax, while tax receipts from everyone else increased 1 percent...
...Scores of local places are more alluring...
...The evidence is that governments engaged in this futile endeavor are inevitably lobbied into sustaining economic duds while impeding promising enterprises...
...This is not a recent phenomenon...
...But then, as aforestated, everything Bill Clinton believes about economics is wrong...
...His dealings at the Rose Law Firm were supposedly under scrutiny...
...Actually, in recent years no evidence has been found to support this belief—though animal-rights advocates might have data on that saltant cow...
...Foster had been extremely close to the Clintons through all their endless campaigns...
...Throughout the 1980s, in fact, the percentage of tax receipts collected from the upper one percent rose considerably, due to declining marginal rates...
...He had been involved in delicate political dealings for the president of the United States...
...Is this true...
...But now the president is leaving Foster's death to the Park Police, keepers of parks and forests, patrollers of revelers and vagrants—but police with no demonstrated competence in forensics...
...It sent the economy into a brief recession and a painfully slow recovery...
...It is a curious place for a top White House aide to enter, even for a suicide...
...What is the truth...
...As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of London's Sunday Telegraph notes, American interest rates are declining as a consequence of ( 1) global deflation, (2) declining interest rates world-wide, and (3) a restrictive (too restrictive...
...and increased spending ($300 billion the next five years...
...For the last thirty years growing numbers of "minorities" have been successfully exempting themselves from government planning...
...Before that he had been a prominent lawyer at Little Rock's politically hyperactive Rose Law Firm, as had Hillary Rodham Clinton and two other powerful government officials—aninduced economic slowdown from 4.7 percent in the last quarter of 1992 to 0.7 percent in this year's first quarter...
...But then this is a very weird presidency...
...Or is a more accurate word deceit...
...And more: he believes that government can coerce all Americans into abiding national planning...
...In fact, the evidence is to the contrary...
...As the Wall Street Journal reported in July, after the Bush tax increase, tax receipts from the rich fell for the first time since the mid-1980s...
...There are times when one gets the sense that this administration of aging 1960s coatand-tie radicals is a gigantic reenactment of The Big Chill, that 1983 film of yuppie middle-aged crisis, emotional and ideological burnout—it began when the suicide of one member of a close-knit group of college friends brought them all home to reflect...
...It is an eerie place...
...That belief suggests that our Boy President suffers schizophrenia...
...monetary policy decided upon by the Fed last year...
...It is entirely possible on the testimony of the President that his deputy White House counsel, Vincent Foster, Jr., met with foul play on July 20...
...Yet he assures us that soaking the rich alone achieves $187 billion in revenues to be placed against the federal deficit...
...The administration had not been slow to bring in the FBI to investigate its White House travel office...
...Why would a very busy newcomer from Arkansas find it interesting...
...At times he believed we were in depression...
...According to Clinton, his tax collectors are going to sop up vast amounts of investment capital in one of the Republic's largest peacetimetax increases...
...He had handled campaign funds and family funds...
...No high White House aide has died under such mysterious circumstances in this century, and the Park Police are handling it...
...The evidence is that government depletes prosperity...
...I71 uncommonly high number from one law firm...
...Yet people in the White House have decided that this shocking ending to a successful, happy public life is only going to be investigated by the federal Park Police, not the FBI...
...the First Family's blind trust...
...He is dead now, and from all that we have heard about him murder cannot be ruled out...
...Supposedly it is a stop-off for dubious liaisons...
...What is more, our president believes that by raising marginal tax rates he can ensure a specific level of increased government revenue—again his belief is bereft of evidence...
...He, Hillary, and another Rose Law Firm colleague, associate director of the Justice Department Webster Hubbell, were involved in an unusual stock partnership, Midlife Investments...
...When marginal taxes become excessive, the rich either shelter their income from the taxpayer or simply work less...
...He believes that government can select promising enterprises in the private sector and make them even more successful...
...That is• what happened when Mr...
...Nothing in Foster's private life suggested suicide...
...After so many unnecessary claims that nothing was amiss before Foster's death, it now turns out that associates feared he was depressed...
...Yet our Boy President today bravely enters the same trap...
...Today he travels the land, asserting that the mere hint of his marvelous budget is responsible for declining interest rates, hence economic growth...
...Until Foster's death I never thought to enter it...
...Moreover, interest rates have not been going down because of Clinton's schizophrenic budget of increased taxes ($250 billion over the next five years...
...Somehow, late on the afternoon of July 20, after disappearing from the White House for five unexplained hours, he found his way into Fort Marcy Park, off the George Washington Parkway a few miles from the White House, and soon was dead...
...What is more, a week after Foster's death the White House admitted that the president, too, was concerned about Foster, and had made a heretofore undisclosed twenty-minute telephone call to him the night before his mysterious death in Fort Marcy Park...
...After Foster's body was found I made my first stop...
...Among other things, I find it odd that he would have discovered this particular park...
...Now, even if interest rates were to decline attendant to a declining deficit, whence will come the money for economic growth...
...Bush raised taxes and when the Washington wizards of tax & spend prevailed temporarily on Ronald Reagan...
...Finally, he believes he can lower the federal deficit while increasing federal spending...
...It should summon the FBI to investigate this mysterious death...
...I can believe it...
...In the White House he had been involved with sensitive matters, some controversial (e.g., Travelgate) and some more commonplace (e.g...
...Foster left Arkansas six months ago to serve his boyhood friend Bill Clinton in the White House...
...Once again, President Clinton is wrong, but then everything he believes about the economy is wrong...
...Alas, recent experience shouts fortissimo that, when government raises taxes, it fails to get the revenues it anticipates...
...The mere hint of his budget has T his is the weirdest presidency I have observed...
...Allow me to go a step further: everything Bill Clinton believes about government is wrong...
...Earlier, a Justice Department official had promised an investigation "to find out what the factors were—if it was a suicide—that led to him killing himself...
...Ironically, advocates of big government such as the Clintons have wrecked big government by expanding its list of special interests: blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, the disabled, and on into anarchy...
...What growth...
...My guess is that the increase will come not at all, and that the deficit will grow...
...The rich are not as ignorant of economics as our politicians...
...Bush's melange of increased government regulation and higher taxes effectively ended America's longest period of peacetime prosperity...
...During President Clinton's affecting eulogy in Little Rock on July 23, Americans were under the impression that a thorough investigation at the highest level was underway...
...No suicide note has been found...
...My second visit there was no more cheerful...
...Huge walls of grim trees and tall shrubs enshroud it...
...But of course, and the cow will jump over the moon...
...At this writing, it is unknown where Foster got the 80-yearold revolver that did him in, or where he was for the five hours before his death...
...But there was...
...We've been up real late two nights in a row now," the president told a reporter, "remembering and crying and laughing and talking about him, and I don't think there is anything else...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
