[jeffkrol]

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said he directly told former President George W. Bush on several occasions that he didn't support the administration's tax cut proposals.

O'Neill's opposition to the tax cuts is no secret — he was fired in December 2002 for challenging the Bush White House on the tax-cut proposal.

But he argues that Bush misstates what happened during the tax-cut discussions in his recently released memoir, Decision Points.

"So for the president to say in his book that it got back to him that I didn't agree with a third round of tax cuts is not true," O'Neill said in an interview with Bloomberg Television's Margaret Brennan. "I said to him directly and personally on three different major occasions, 'This is why we shouldn't do it. These are my reasons.' "

Beginning in April 2002, in a meeting with top administration officials including Chief of Staff Andrew Card, senior adviser Karl Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney and Commerce Secretary Don Evans, O'Neill said they were telling Bush, " 'Well, you need to mount an effort for another round of tax cuts.' "

"I said, clearly, 'This is not a good idea for these reasons. We've just had 9/11. We could have another one of those. There's a conversation about going to Iraq. God only knows how much that could cost,' " O'Neill said in the interview.

"By the time we got to August, nobody was agreeing with me because to the rest of them it was clear that the decision had been made," he said.

Instead, O'Neill said he instead argued for fundamental tax reform and for fixing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security with an aging population.

"And rather than another tax cut, we should use the money you're talking about to deal with these other problems and have some money in case some of these other things happen in terms of attacks and wars in Iraq and things like that," O'Neill said.

"Just as clearly as I said it to you I said it to him and to all of the other assembled group."

Since his departure eight years ago, O'Neill has stood by his argument, saying that the money could've been better spent on entitlement programs and the growing deficit.

He said Cheney's statement that "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" occurred during one of those tax-cut meetings.

He also said he never clicked with Bush. In a 2008 interview with The New York Times, O'Neill said he wasn't bitter about his service for the Bush administration.

"I’m thankful I got fired when I did, so that I didn’t have to be associated with what they subsequently did."

O'Neill says Bush's memoir misstates record on tax-cut talks - The Hill's On The Money

[skyredoubt]

O'Neil was mostly right but for the wrong reasons.