I want to do a post on the incredible ineptitude exhibited by America's economic, political and journalistic elite over the last decade. But before delving into that on a class-wide basis, I just want to capture in broad strokes the extraordinary misfeasance and malfeasance perpetrated during the Bush years and why it is so crucial that the Republicans not be rewarded with electoral success in the mid-terms. A couple of salient facts need to be stressed: 1) the Bush years, in which the presidency and both houses of Congress fell under the control of movement conservatives were an unmitigated disaster for the country; and 2) today's Republican Party has no policy solutions that differ from those implemented between January 2001 and January 2007. Indeed, the current policy positions of the GOP and its tea party allies represent a doubling down on failure -- a pledge for tax cuts for the rich, continued deregulation of business, and eternal war against Islam.
Let's review briefly what became of America during the Bush years and ask the fundamental question that needs to be asked regarding the 2010 campaign -- is this really what the American people wish to return to?
When Bush took office on January 20, 2001, there were 132,469,000 jobs in the United States. When he left office on January 19, 2009, there were 133,549,000 jobs in the United States. That is total job growth of 1.1 million over eight years, or an annualized rate of growth of about .8%, the lowest rate of job growth since Herbert Hoover was in office, when jobs actually declined by a stunning average of 9% per year.
(Broad historical lesson digression coming up.) By contrast, the much maligned Jimmy Carter presided over an economy in which 10.3 million jobs were created in four years. The 3.1% annualized rate of job growth under Carter was, by the way, better than that achieved by any of his successors. The only presidents who achieved better than 3% annual job growth since 1920 were Harding/Coolidge from 1921-25, Roosevelt in his first and third terms, Truman, LBJ, and Carter. The best any Republican president has done in the last 85 years was Reagan in his second term, when jobs grew at at an annual rate of 2.7% -- as noted previously, in five of the ten full terms in which Democrats served as presidents they bettered the 3% mark and in three of the other terms (Roosevelt 2, Kennedy/Johnson, and Clinton 1) the annual job growth rate was 2.6%, i.e. a tenth of a percent lower than the Republican candidate for Mt. Rushmore. No other Republican has done better than 2.2% jobs growth over this 85 year period.
But what of Wall Street -- surely investors prefer Republican rule. Well, when Bush took office on January 20, 2001, the S&P 500 stood at 1342.90. When he left office on January 19, 2009, the S&P 500 stood at 850, a decline of 27% over his eight years in office. Think about that -- the broad measure of large capitalization stocks in the United States lost over a quarter of its value in an eight year period. This is actually comparable to the return during the Great Depression. The -27% for the S&P during the Bush years does not factor in inflation, which ran at an annual rate of about 2.5% during those years. So, in essence, the broad market declined in value by about 40-45% during this period.
The U.S. went from running surpluses and reducing its debt during the final Clinton years to a massive expansion of its deficit under Bush, largely to finance tax cuts for the rich and to pay for two costly and disastrous wars. Bush presided over two stock market collapses, two failed wars, and two recessions, the latter the most massive since the Great Depression, with affects that continue to this day. The last full quarter in which Bush was president saw a decrease in GDP of 6.8%.
There really isn't adequate space to address the extraordinary drop in American prestige that accompanied a war of aggression fought for bogus reasons, the use of torture as official U.S. policy, massive increases in poverty and inequality, and the world-wide economic collapse largely brought about by irresponsible American financial institutions.
And the current Republican response to this record of shame is to say give us another shot to make it all happen again.
Again, I want to deal with the broader failings of a more bipartisan elite, but feel like this is the necessary pre-condition to understanding that Republicans generally and conservatives specifically, on a virtually across-the-board basis, have laid our country low in ways that are almost too numerous to quantify. Sadly, as I will demonstrate later, the people who should have provided some check on this gang that couldn't shoot straight failed almost as miserably, continue to fail us to this day, and in most instances, seem to have learned nothing by their failures.
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