I think Bush and his economic advisors -- N. Gregory Mankiw (excellent), Glenn Hubbard (horrible), and Ben Bernanke (also excellent) -- missed the point, though Mankiw and Bernanke clearly haven't had much influence.  Bush would've move forward on these particular cuts, with or without them.

It's not that increased savings is bad.  Quite the contrary.  Americans need to save more.  But it's the working- and middle-classes that need more opportunity to save, and not through some moronic scheme to privatize Social Security.  That's how we could've pursued a Pareto-improving outcome in the future, by helping people gain access to the tools needed to "create" wealth.  (I wish economists could come up with a different term for this.  "Create" makes it sound like higher standards of living just appear out of nowhere.)

The upper-class in America already saves an enormous chunk of its income -- the kind of rates you typically find in Asian countries.  I suspect it's a similar story in Europe.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin

Briefly, a large number (around 3% of the working-age population) of the long-term unemployed in the UK left the labour market for sickness/disability benefit and are no longer counted in the unemployment stats. My beef is against the use of unemployment numbers as weapons in the non-stop "US/UK good, France/Germany bad" propaganda game. ("Just look at our low numbers, theirs are much higher, therefore their economies are failing etc...")

In fact, though, the UK may well have had the tight labour market that, as Drew says, wage growth suggests. But two contributory factors not generally recognized are the number of long-term unemployed taken off the market and supported at public cost, and the large-scale creation of public-sector jobs. I'm not knocking this, or suggesting Brown isn't a capable Chancellor; but under-the-radar Keynesianism it is.