BUSHONOMICS….Kash at Angry Bear has a nice table that summarizes the economic performance of the Bush administration compared to every administration since 1968. Bottom line: on practically every measure, Bush’s performance is either the worst of the past three decades or in the bottom three.
And this handy chart, which I hope Kash doesn’t mind my ripping off, shows just how anemic job creation has been under Bush compared to job creation after the last recession. Dismal hardly begins to describe it.
The most frustrating part of all this is that I suspect an awful lot of people don’t really blame Bush for any of this. They don’t truly believe that wonky economic policy has much to do with real world results, and they figure that arguments about it are just so much partisan blather. Conservatives have long encouraged this kind of thinking by persuading people that government mucks up everything, and George Bush encourages it more specifically by inventing excuse after excuse for why the poor economic performance of the past four years isn’t his responsibility. It was Clinton’s fault, it was 9/11, it was the Iraq war, it was hurricanes in Florida, it was something. It was anybody’s fault but his.
But the fact is that we could have done better. Nearly any reasonable economic policy ? including reasonable conservative economic policies ? would have done better. It’s too bad more people don’t understand that.
