Bush Boom ? Nope. Wash Post - Bush Economy was Worst in Decades
 

It was pretty amazing to see conservatives try to claim that the economy was good under Bush.

Well the data is in and it's obvious that Bush failed at the economy just like he failed at everything else.

I can't post the link to this article (cause my post count isn't high enough) but if you google the title it's the first link that pops up. I'll insert the link later when i am allowed to.

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Economy Made Few Gains in Bush Years
Eight-Year Period Is Weakest in Decades


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President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges.

Your link doesn't work.

The boom that conservatives talk about is how quickly the economic downturn, which started under the last years of Clinton and was further strengthened by the post 9/11 stock collapse, rebounded and regained what was lost.

He has no excuse for the massive budget he built up, or for letting the pay-as-you-go policy Republicans had previously strong-armed into policy lapse.

He said he couldn't post a link due to his status here. I think this is the article he's talking about- Here

Bush ran the economy into the ground with borrow and spend polices, IMO. The guy never vetoed one spending bill, right? Easy to be popular when you give people everything they want, never say no to anything. Problem is you can't sustain spending like that and not screw up the economy.

there are alot of problems with the bush period.
in terms of economic measurements, it was an extreme version of narrow-vision in that only the velocity of capital mattered. the social consequences of that movement, both in terms of the institutions that benefitted directly and even more in terms of the wider socio-economic situation...none of that was on the radar.
none of that was on the neoliberal radar more generally.
bad information yields incoherent outcomes. look around if you aren't sure of what incoherence means.

i still find it funny that people act as though clinton was somehow other than a neoliberal. he wasn't. the main difference between republican and democrat forms of neoliberalism was in the relation to multilateral agreements. clinton favored them. the bush people, like their republican predecessors, preferred bilateral forms. underneath this was a divergence in assumptions about power and empire. the democrats under clinton anyway preferred a more diffuse type of power; the neocons in particular preferred a more centralized form.

the last 30 years has been a period of unbroken neoliberal domination. the disaster that was the end of the bush period was the result of this domination.
it was compounded--and still is---by the incoherence of how neoliberals measure economic activity.
these measures are a direct expression of the logic of cowboy capitalism itself.

that's what caused the disaster that was the end of the bush administration.
what the bush people did to speed the plow was weaken the united states politically in such a radical way that the neoliberal order, which had been held together by american domination, came unravelled.
folk act like this is some purely economic crisis. that too is a reflection of incoherent ways of seeing things.

sometimes this stuff makes me laugh.
think the end of the hapsburgs and maybe it'll make you laugh too.

The World of Yesterday is increasingly worth reading.

There are two ways to look at the economy, one is to look at common economic indicators and the other is to look at what you have in the "bank". It is far to simplistic to take a few statistics here and there and come to any real meaningful conclusions. Each President presides over an economy that is unique. Comparing major transitional economic periods to those periods that follow and then drawing conclusions because of the comparison is silly. Kinda like comparing the growth spurt of a teenage to the growth of the same person as an adult. It might be unhealthy for the adult to put on weight the way they did as a teen. Our economy went through a once in a life time transition with the dot com age in the 90's, just like we went through an economic boom in the 1920's due to modernization factors and production innovations.

I wouldn't blame our current dire straits on any one executive over the last 30 years. It's the result of a flawed economic model that relied too much on speculation on the future, and not enough on productivity. That's why conservatives are up in arms; "business as usual" and a lassez faire attitude has put us in the shitter, and we are going to need a new economic model to avoid perpetuating the status quo that has brought the economy to its knees.

It is interesting when looking at "systems" and determining if those "systems" are flawed when those "systems" have built in self correcting mechanisms. I guess if it is possible to have a perfect "system" that is not impacted by conditions that can create imbalance, then a "system" short of that can certainly be called flawed. However, a "system" that self corrects for imbalances could be a pretty efficient "system". I think our economic system is self correcting and those who try to micromanage it actually do more harm than good.