Orange_Juice
Senior Member
- Jul 24, 2008
- 1,038
- 57
- 48
McCain will continue with these failed policies? That's anti-American in my book
Bush 36,000
I'd never go as far as conservatives do in attributing economic growth to tax rates. But that's the right's game, so let's see how the Bush Boom measures up, now that it's gone to macroeconomic heaven. A recent paper by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) compares the Bush Boom to the ten previous periods of economic expansion since 1949. If you measure it from the peak of the previous business cycle, the Bush Boom ranks eighth out of the last ten expansions. If you measure it from the trough of the recession, Bush's preferred gauge, it ranks dead last.
And the meager growth that did occur accrued almost entirely to the rich. One of the few categories where the Bush Boom really did boom was corporate profits, which rank, depending on which measure you use, second or fourth. But wage and salary growth ranks last out of the ten previous expansions. Median family income actually declined. As the EPI paper notes, "this marks the first time this has happened since World War II in a business cycle lasting anywhere near as long as the most recent cycle." So, from the standpoint of making most people better off--which, of course, is the whole point of economic growth--the Bush Boom was a staggering catastrophe.
The Bush Boom was accompanied by frantic attempts to convince Americans that things were actually going better than they thought. One comical subgenre of Republican argumentation was to explain away polls showing persistent economic pessimism as a kind of false consciousness. If polls showed that people thought the economy was bad, it wasn't because their incomes hadn't risen--it must be the fault of the liberal media playing up bad news and ignoring the glories of the Boom. Ubiquitous right-wing economic commentator Larry Kudlow even coined a catchphrase to describe the press's suppression of the Bush Boom: "The greatest story never told."
When Phil Gramm recently remarked that we were becoming "a nation of whiners, " he gave voice to what had become the standard Republican view. What's the matter with you people? Can't you see that Phil Gramm and everybody he knows are making out like bandits?
Now that the Boom has ended, the new GOP line is to acknowledge the bad times but proceed on cheerfully as if all conservative economic precepts have been borne out. Bush recently declared, "the economy is not doing as well as we'd like to do--like it to do today, but there's no question that the tax cuts provided economic vitality." John McCain asserted, "Raising taxes in a bad economy is about the worst thing you could do because it will kill even more jobs when what we need are policies that create jobs." (Last year, remember, you couldn't raise taxes on the rich because the economy was growing, which proved the tax cuts worked.)
Bush 36,000
I'd never go as far as conservatives do in attributing economic growth to tax rates. But that's the right's game, so let's see how the Bush Boom measures up, now that it's gone to macroeconomic heaven. A recent paper by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) compares the Bush Boom to the ten previous periods of economic expansion since 1949. If you measure it from the peak of the previous business cycle, the Bush Boom ranks eighth out of the last ten expansions. If you measure it from the trough of the recession, Bush's preferred gauge, it ranks dead last.
And the meager growth that did occur accrued almost entirely to the rich. One of the few categories where the Bush Boom really did boom was corporate profits, which rank, depending on which measure you use, second or fourth. But wage and salary growth ranks last out of the ten previous expansions. Median family income actually declined. As the EPI paper notes, "this marks the first time this has happened since World War II in a business cycle lasting anywhere near as long as the most recent cycle." So, from the standpoint of making most people better off--which, of course, is the whole point of economic growth--the Bush Boom was a staggering catastrophe.
The Bush Boom was accompanied by frantic attempts to convince Americans that things were actually going better than they thought. One comical subgenre of Republican argumentation was to explain away polls showing persistent economic pessimism as a kind of false consciousness. If polls showed that people thought the economy was bad, it wasn't because their incomes hadn't risen--it must be the fault of the liberal media playing up bad news and ignoring the glories of the Boom. Ubiquitous right-wing economic commentator Larry Kudlow even coined a catchphrase to describe the press's suppression of the Bush Boom: "The greatest story never told."
When Phil Gramm recently remarked that we were becoming "a nation of whiners, " he gave voice to what had become the standard Republican view. What's the matter with you people? Can't you see that Phil Gramm and everybody he knows are making out like bandits?
Now that the Boom has ended, the new GOP line is to acknowledge the bad times but proceed on cheerfully as if all conservative economic precepts have been borne out. Bush recently declared, "the economy is not doing as well as we'd like to do--like it to do today, but there's no question that the tax cuts provided economic vitality." John McCain asserted, "Raising taxes in a bad economy is about the worst thing you could do because it will kill even more jobs when what we need are policies that create jobs." (Last year, remember, you couldn't raise taxes on the rich because the economy was growing, which proved the tax cuts worked.)
