Thursday, December 8
Think Progress » The Straight Truth About the Bush Economy
Gene Sperling:
But it’s downright misleading to ignore the economy’s weaknesses so the White House can falsely claim their fiscally reckless tax policy is an unequivocal success. When it comes to economic policy, President Bush is like the football coach with a 4-12 record who wants to tell you how his strategy has led to the four victories while pretending he has had an immaculate season. So if the President wants to claim his tax cuts have been the primary cause of our current economic performance since the end of the recession in November 2001, here are a few more economic facts he might want to consider.This is a fantastic read.
It describes pretty much what I feel is going on in the economy as far as I'm feeling it. This brings up quite a few issues that the people that are trying to crow about in this economy should actually pay attention to. Of course, they won't. I'll break down some of it.
Wages — Negative growth, even as this is supposed to be a recovery. $/hr, $/week, $/yr. This is not good. Inflation isn't bad *cough*bullshit*cough*. Especially if you take out food, fuel and housing. And (especially!) Americans don't have to deal with those piddling things. Oops, take away an American's food, fuel and housing, and you've pretty much wrecked the American dream now, haven't we? We can't eat to excess, drive where ever the hell we want to, and have our nice house.
Employment growth — Let's just say that this is pretty much the worst growth ever for a recovery. Makes me wonder if we really truly are in a recovery. The point is also made that the effective unemployment rate is more than 6%, not the 5% that is reported.
Poverty — Poverty rate has risen since Bush has been President, compared to when it was dropping when we had Clinton in office. African-Americans an children are also jumping up in poverty rates. This is also the only recovery on record where poverty increased between the 2nd and 3rd years. I'll repeat myself, are we in a recovery?
Savings — Personal savings rates are negative, -2.18% in August this year. This family isn't doing that this year, but we sure did that last year. Thinking about it, I guess we weren't quite that bad off, but we sure did shuffle around a lot of money. It was probably a wash. Record percentages of disposable income are now used to service debt (note, that's not neccessarily to pay off debt, that's to at least pay the interest, which with a lot of credit card debt at 18% rates, one has to wonder…) My question is, should that really be considered disposable income then? When Bush took office, net national savings was short of 5%. It's now at 1% this quarter, lowest since the Great Depression. Are we in a recovery yet?? The CBO in January 2001 predicted a 5 trillion dollar surplus in 10 years. Goldman Sachs 5 years later is predicting a 5 trillion dollar deficit over the next 5 years. What the hell happened there? Bush's tax cuts, that's what happened. Our current account deficit with the rest of the world is horrible. We are expecting foreigners to lend us 3 billion dollars a day! What's going to happen when the dollar plummets? How far will it drop before we find out we can't afford this direction of action?
Are we in a recovery yet?
And some great comments as well. Read it all.
Technorati tags: economy Relevant Link Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 12/08/2005 08:37:00 PM
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