For the Defense
This Washington Post article on how “President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades” is pretty great. The best part is the Bush Team’s pathetic defense of their record:
Bush and his aides are quick to point out that they oversaw 52 straight months of job growth in the middle of this decade, and that the economy expanded at a steady clip from 2003 to 2007. But economists, including some former advisers to Bush, say it increasingly looks as if the nation’s economic expansion was driven to a large degree by the interrelated booms in the housing market, consumer spending and financial markets. Those booms, which the Bush administration encouraged with the idea of an “ownership society,” have proved unsustainable.
52 months would be great except that there are 96 months in an eight-year term. In other words, if you overlook Vietnam then Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy went okay.
47 Responses to “For the Defense”
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January 12th, 2009 at 10:04 am
But Matt, it wasn’t his fault. If you’ve been listening to Pres Bush in the surreal press conference just now, you would realize that bad things just “happened” during his presidency.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:05 am
He just used it again in his final wrong-off. It’s immeasurable how much I won’t miss this man.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:28 am
At least The President told us all to go out and shop after 9-11. That was some bold leadership there, it was.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Matt, you forget! President Bush kept us safe from terrorism, too (except that one time).
January 12th, 2009 at 10:30 am
This fucking asshole of a PResident pissed away $6 TRILLION!!! NO investment –NOTHING to show for it.
why did the press think that was sustainable? What did the press think was going happen when the Chinese turned off the spigot?
January 12th, 2009 at 10:31 am
furthermore, crystal meth is an entirely reasonable long-term plan for good sustainable health, as long as you don’t look past the first year or so.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:35 am
How long until the right begins reconstructing these last 8 years as teh BEST evar? Or is that already being done? (I’m not counting pre-August/September collapse triumphalism, it has to be a reboot to count.)
January 12th, 2009 at 10:39 am
I think Wolf Blitzer, of all people, hit the nail on the head when he asked Dick Cheney how Bush could argue he kept the country safe when he failed to catch Osama bin Laden.
This economic argument is as pathetic as their national security argument. Yes, the economy collapsed, but golly gee, it’s not their fault. They were just innocent bystanders, and besides, it’ll all work out for the best because America is so very wonderful. Why are you criticizing team Bush–do you not think America is wonderful?
January 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am
1) Looks to me like George and the Republican Party are leaving the Democrats holding a very smelly bag of cat shit. Look at
3 years of high unemployment and tell me how the Democrats will fare in 2002 and whether Obama will be reelected in 2004.
Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly will be burning up the airwaves over the next 3 years blaming Obama and the Democrats for every misfortune that falls on the Republic — and recounting the Golden Age of the George W Bush Administration. The Blame Homo Barney bitchslapping is just a preview of coming attractions.
2) Remember what I told you in Dec 2006?
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2006/12/the_sweet_sweet_fed.php#comment-119132
I fucking told you so.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am
well, el cid, why *shouldn’t* the right think it was the best ever?
it was certainly the best ever time to be an anti-science ideologue; to be a war-profiteer; to be a religious bigot (provided your religion was evangelical); to be a talking-pin-head; to be a torture-loving tough-guy.
in other words, it was a *wonderful* time to be a republ
it was just a horrible time to be an american. ican.
of course they’re going to get misty-eyed about it.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:43 am
President Bush kept us safe from terrorism, too (except that one time).
Exactly. Bush actually wants to get credit for seven years without terrorist attacks, while ignoring the bloodiest day on American soil since Antietam, and wants to get credit for years of job growth while ignoring the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. First Great Depression.
What an asshole.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Don’t you have to take job growth in the context of population growth? Good econ reporting adjusts wage growth for inflation. It should do the same for job growth and population.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:47 am
kid bitzer: I understand; I meant to specifically inquire about the economic success.
In my view right now the right is admitting there are problems but are blaming them on the Demcrap Congriss and Barney Frank and Naaaanceee PelOHsi and Jimmy Carter and the CRA and black people.
I’m asking if they’ll just reverse and instead of blaming liberals for the economic crash but simply deny that there ever were any problems, it was all some media conspiracy maybe and George W. Bush Jr. had the best 8 economic years in the history of EVAR!
January 12th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Shorter Bush: Pull & pray is effective* birth control…20 odd days a month!
* – don’t ask which days
January 12th, 2009 at 10:49 am
1) What’s sickening is the pathetic cowardice of the Mainstream News Media. Bush is leaving –has no power left — and yet the press is STILL afraid to confront Bush over the obvious lies Bush has been telling since day 1.
The News Media doesn’t exist to inform the American people — it exists to lie to them.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:00 am
The WP article is pretty good, but it fails to give any indication whether the nation’s production capacity was enhanced during the Bush years. Sure, lots of houses were built, but that doesn’t add to production capacity. We will never entirely overcome the business cycle, so the question that should be considered is whether the nation invested in our future by, for example, investing in new factories and equipment, new technology, and education.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I’ll play devil’s advocate. The huge structural adjustments that would have been needed in 2001 to avoid the disaster we see now would have been too much for any administration to even think about taking. Not that they even thought about it but it was a political impossibility. For the entire structure of the economy then was already based upon wildly excessive credit, the inflation of assets, labor arbitrage and it’s vital twin dollar recycling, and of course accounting and financial fraud and crime on a grand scale.
The 7 years before the end were just an extension of every trend that was already in force and if in some alternate universe our elites had decided to end them the readjustments would have been painful in the extreme.
To a large extent Obama’s policies bear no difference from the current ones and certainly there is in the rhetoric no hint that the structural problems built in over the last 30 years were somehow flawed. More credit to reflate assets is still the foundation of all plans. Along with more consumption although some of it is envisioned to be into infrastructure and thus capital investment.
I’m an extreme skeptic that Humpty can be put together again into any reasonable facsimile of what was before but I’m usually wrong. Everyone want’s to retain large portions of the recent reality because it’s all they know. Any fundamental deviation is politically impossible. For the most part impossible to even conceive.
That change would entail far less consumption and reliance upon gigantic institutions that are the multinational corporations. Far less opportunity to get rich speculating on asset inflation. A greatly diminished military presence around the world to greatly reduce spending. None of these things will ever be widely popular politically. They will only come to pass by force or necessity. Politics can’t change them.
As Fafnir said of Obama. Change you can suspend your disbelief in.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Listening to the press conference I liked how Bush compared himself to the 16th President.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:25 am
1) Re rapier’s comment, I disagree.
IF Obama is trying to stimulate the economy, it is because we are now in vastly different circumstances than we were in 2001. We are heading into a Great Depression and our debt is $6 Trillion higher. Want to think about what we could do with $6 Trillion in capital right now? Especially if we didn’t have to pay $300 BILLION per year in Interest alone on that $6 Trillion?
2) The major “structural problems” are:
a) A Supreme Court that supports a campaign finance system which forces both parties to betray the country in order to whore for rich men and raise $1 Billion per campaign.
b) A US President who had been a miserable failure in life until he realized that his life strategy/decision-making should be to just do what rich men told him to do.
c) A professional political elite which operates on the same simple-minded algorithm as George W — avoid pain, embrace pleasure/money and fuck the the country.
d) A News Media which is paid to lie to the voters in order to cover up a-c.
3) We have 4 TIMES more people in prison per capita than Communist China. Many of those people are in prison out of economic desperation.
YEt think of all the crimes committed by our political class over the last 8 years. $3 Trillion stolen from Social Security/Medicare. 4000 men sent to their deaths based on lies. At least 4 of the Bill of Rights turned into dead letters by members of the American Bar Association. $Trillions wasted while a high percentage of Americans live in deep, hopeless poverty. A Second Great Depression inflicted on the people due to simple greed and legalized corruption.
What punishment will the guilty politicans and their supporters suffer? Tom Delay. George W Bush. Dick Cheney. Phil Gramm. The Neocons. Fox News. Rupert Murdoch. Rush Limbaugh. Bill O’Reilly. Glenn Reynolds.
Looks to me like crime pays.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I think this is an unfair characterization. From personal experiences, a great number of people I know have upgraded and redecorated their homes and now have a higher standard of living, and they still remain in their homes.
One has to realise that technological innovation and improvements in productivity do not happen in isolation. The 52 months of relative monetary stability was pretty crucial in the developments of large-screen plasma television, productivity-enhancing personal electronic devices like the Blackberry, and perhaps most importantly, the development of much more comfortable and better cars.
I am sometimes surprised at how bare-bones a car from 2000 now seems compared to its 2008 model equivalent.
To those who say that Bush had no hand in all this progress, look up JImmy Carter’s presidency. Instead of better cars, Americans now had to sit freezing in their offices in the middle of winter. He actually made the relevant authorities make heating available only at lower (freezing) temperatures during the winter. I don’t think anyone could attribute to Carter’s presidency any sort of moderate improvements in living standards that we at least could materially trace in the last eight years.
Be thankful. At least you don’t end up with freezing in the middle of winter at this end of the eight years.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
You folks criticizing Bush’s economic economic record are going to be unsurprisingly mute when the Obama economy turns out being worse than any in decades. Republicans will be comparing Obama invidiously to Bush on the economy just as Democrats compared Bush invidiously to Clinton.
In reality, of course, this is all bullshit. As Rapier noted, a thirty year long bubble in credit burst on Bush’s watch.
January 12th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
“Indeed, it is easily possible that Bush will end up owning the economy until whenever it turns better. In that sense, the American people may view “the Obama economy” as really only starting whenever the recovery begins.”
Like Clinton “owned” the 2001 recession and 2000-2002 bear market? It doesn’t work that way, but keep dreaming. Even as biased as the media is, it won’t be able to pin the miserable Obama economy on Bush after the first 6 months or so of Obama’s presidency. By summer, the current recession will be as long as the longest post-WWII recession. It will continue at least until the end of the year, and whatever recovery starts in 2010 will be weak and jobless.
You just elected another Carter. On the bright side, maybe he’ll be followed by another Reagan.
January 12th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Actually, it seems that in hindsight, Carter was right about every single damned thing, from civil liberties, to human rights, trade, industrialization, energy policy, etc. It’s clear that if America had stuck with Carter, it would have been in a much better situation today.
But it seems that America chose the easy path downward, instead of the hard road to better things. Ronald Reagan sold America empty promises, the political equivalent of junk food, comforting lies even as the rot set in.
PS: Steven Myles, not as funny as your “I heart Hitler” post, but damned funny nevertheless.
January 12th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
During Jimmy Carter’s presidency:
Unemployment dropped slightly, from 7.5% to 7.2%.
There was an average annual growth in GDP of nearly 3%.
Debt, as a percentage of GDP dropped from 36.2% to 33.3%.
Mean and Median income rose very slightly.
What you did have under Carter was inflation.
Anyone who bought a house between 1960 and 1972 made out like a bandit. They were paying 3-6% interest rates while their pay was keeping pace with 6-13% inflation.
George Bush had nothing whatsoever to do with any technological progress involved in big screen TVs. If all you want is contemporaneousness, then you’ll have to credit Carter for the explosion of personal computer use in 1977.
There is no comparisson. Bush is horrible in every aspect compared to Carter.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Carter was right about every single damned thing,
Except his incapacity to realise that inflation and big labour needed to be defeated for the U.S. to grow again.
By the time he left office, there was a significant risk of the U.S. veering into Latin American-style hyperinflation. There was no sound money to speak of, and savings became a sop.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
They were paying 3-6% interest rates while their pay was keeping pace with 6-13% inflation.
If you don’t know how sort of economic disaster this sentence portends, you are truly clueless. When you are paying next to no interest compared to gigantic inflation, what is essentially happening is negative interest on savings.
Negative interest, naturally, leads to negative capital accumulation (what’s the point of savings and investment if the returns are negative?) and long-term economic catastrophe. Thankfully Volcker slayed the beast.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Debt, as a percentage of GDP dropped from 36.2% to 33.3%.
This, as real interest rates were negative, means absolutely NOTHING. In fact, it is shocking and disappointing that it wasn’t reduced more.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Carter appointed Paul Volcker as fed chairman specifically for his inflation fighting inclinations. If you want to see the cause of inflation in that era, look at a chart of the normallized price of oil. It had nothing to do with any economic policies, other than the decades of policies that made us dependent on imported oil.
Big “labour” did not need to be defeated. If labor were stronger, we would have higher wages, and less of the growth of recent years would have been dependent on expanding consumer credit. The biggest problem in the US economy now is that ordinary workers are not being paid enough to buy what we can produce. All of our growth is going to the extremely wealthy whose consumption is not as linearly dependent on income.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
ordinary workers are not being paid enough to buy what we can produce
I don’t know how much simpler I can explain this, but tax cuts for the rich serves an economic purpose in the sense that as they don’t need to consume the extra money, they save and thus invest it, and the extra money translates into long-term investment and thus boosts in productivity and GDP.
This is actually the other side of the coin of liberal economists opposing moderate and higher-income tax cuts as a stimulus measure because the money will just be saved, and not just for consumption. It’s actually the same logic and the same process, just applied to different ends.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Carter’s economic policies weren’t all bad, and some of them continued under the Reagan administration (e.g., industrial deregulation, support for Paul Volcker’s fight against inflation). The tax rates on income and investment were way too high under Carter though, and that tended to lead to inefficient investment of capital (e.g., instead of investing in the most productive businesses, investors often sought to invest in real estate or other limited partnerships with greater tax advantages due to depreciation allowances).
Carter’s foreign policy, on the other hand, was far worse. He seemed to never meet a despot he didn’t like, and our humiliation at the hands of Iran was a nadir for the United States.
January 12th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
What did Carter do to cause inflation?
January 12th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
I love the Stephen Myles persona, it’s like Stephen Colbert only with a straighter face. Utterly shameless and incompetent no matter what the subject, opinionated, arrogant and hilariously wrong every time out.
January 13th, 2009 at 3:02 am
Yes. As productivity increases more employees can be laid off. These employees take jobs in much lower-paying manpower-intensive fields. In addition, these investments are often overseas, which does nothing for the US economy.
When the tax cuts are directed at those who spend most of their money, you get real growth as businesses need to actually increase production, rather than simply increasing productivity.
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