For those of you, however few and however stubbornly you hold to your demonstrably incorrect beliefs, here's what's really been happening to the U.S. economy. For eight years, Bill Clinton led one of the strongest economic expansions in U.S. history, with record budget surpluses to show for it. Then, beginning in 2000, George W. Bush, with the help of a rubber-stamp Republican majority in both houses of Congress for the first six years, reversed all of that and set the economy on fire.
He did this by implementing massive tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy, launching two unfunded wars, essentially put on the credit card, one of which was based on sketchy intelligence and proved to be utterly unfounded and unnecessary, enacted one of the biggest new entitlements in the last half-century (Medicare Part D), not only unfunded but designed by intention to hamstring the government from getting the best prices, thereby leaving it to pay whatever the pharmaceutical industry demanded, and deregulated the financial industry, leaving it free to manipulate the market with highly risky mortgage derivatives, leading to the collapse of the housing bubble and resulting in the single largest loss of Americans' wealth since 1929.
When President Obama took office in 2009, the economy was in utter chaos and free-fall. During the Presidential campaign in 2008, nobody yet knew the depth and severity of the economic collapse, which only became apparent after the election. his is not contested opinion, this is fact. The economy was shedding jobs by the hundreds of thousands every month, well into 2009, before any of Obama's policies could even begin to go into effect. nce those policies did, the situation reversed. The job market stabilized, and turned around, slowly. It has now produced a net gain since the beginning of the Obama Presidency. The 2009 stimulus, together with the auto industry rescue, have collectively saved and created at least 3 million jobs. Had the stimulus been as large as Obama and the Democrats wanted, that number would now be more like 4 million. Had Congress passed the American Jobs Act, we could have added more than an additional 1 million jobs. The Republicans continue to blame Obama for the recession (nearly a depression) that he inherited, in spite of the FACT that it occurred on Bush's watch, and the FACT that he has lead us out of it.
But the Republicans in the House and Senate had other ideas. Rather than try to work with Obama and the Democrats to try to fix the economy and help the American people, they decided on day one to employ a strategy of obstruction, obstruction, obstruction. They held a meeting on inauguration day in which they vowed to defeat any of Obama's efforts and work to deny him a second term, as their primary objective. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has admitted as much publicly.
Romney's plans for the economy (such as they are, with the scant and sketchy details he's made available) are to return to many of the same policies that created the mess in the first place. He moans about the deficit and the debt, but all independent analyses of his plan say that it will increase the deficit and the debt, and further transfer wealth upward.
So what we have had, in essence, is akin to an arsonist burning down a house, blaming the man who put out the fire, castigating him for taking too long to rebuild it, all the while withholding the wood, nails, and shingles he needs, and then saying they could rebuild it faster and better, but doing so by offering to douse it with gasoline. Somehow, people have been conned into thinking this could actually work. The reasons for this are the subject for another post, but suffice to say, those who believe this malarkey (thank you, Joe Biden, for reviving this marvelous word) either haven't bothered to review the facts, are so ideologically rigid that they can no longer see reason, or are biased in other ways that are in fact inexplicable. The Romney economic plan is a recipe for disaster. Wake up and smell the fire.
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