With all inauguration coverage, all the time today, I thought we might try to keep the focus on erconomic/market related matters.
Time magazine has an article on Bush’s economics mistakes that I would direct you to except for the annoying 9 page clicks required (click whores!).
Rather than send you there, I’ll give you the 8, with excerpts of their commentary:
1. The Return to Deficits: Bush’s tax cuts and spending increases — and clear disdain for the pay-as-you-go approach that had brought deficits down in the 1990s — brought a return to permanent deficits.
2. Iraq: Even if you think the war did bring benefits to the U.S., they would have to be pretty gigantic to justify the costs of $1-3 trillion dollars;
3. Tax Cuts for the Rich: Bush came to Washington facing almost diametrically opposing economic conditions, yet he offered up the same solutions as Reagan.
4. Financial Regulation: What is true is that most Bush-era financial regulators were less than enthusiastic about the very act of regulating, and that Bush’s “ownership society” push glossed over a lot of potential dangers.
5. Telling Us to Go Shopping: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush didn’t call for sacrifice. He called for shopping.
6. Energy Policy: Not much to say here, except that there wasn’t an energy policy.
7. A State of Denial: Every Administration spins and sugarcoats the economic truth. But the Bush White House took this disingenuousness to new levels.
8. The Muddled Bailout: The main problem has been the ambivalence with which both Paulson and the White House have approached the financial rescue.
Pretty straightforward analysis . . .
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Source:
A Look Back at Bush’s Economic Missteps
JUSTIN FOX
Time, January 2009
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872229_1872230_1872231,00.html
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