Acidus wrote:

Via the Democratic Caucus...

I'm rerecommending this chart because of the data it contains and not because of the conclusions it seeks to have you draw from that data.

The Bush Administration is certainly directly responsible for some of the changes on this list, such as international opinion of the US, and the increases in our budget and trade deficits.

However, in many respects this chart is pure partisan bullshit. The most starkly annoying aspect is the inclusion of US dependence on foreign oil as a percentage of total oil consumption by the party that faught domestic oil exploration in Alaska. You're blaiming your partisan enemy for the inevitable consequences of the policies you advocated. That's as low as it gets.

Many of the items on this list, such as the increase in oil prices and the amount of job creation, are related to aspects of the business cycle or developments in the global economy that aren't the direct responsibility of the Bush administration. Some, such as changes in the cost of insurance and the number of people insured, are more clearly political, but are the fault of a wide array of actors and not just the Presidency. In fact, the Administration did work on the insurance problem.

The things that I like about this chart are political but I don't see them as directly related to Bush. The most important statistic, I think, is the median household income. It dropped. In 8 years, it dropped.

On some levels sure it's partisan, this was done by the Democratic Caucus after all and they want to illustrate things that are negatives for W and the GOP.

A combination that I specifically want to call your attention to is this. GDP growth is 2.65% over those years, that's an annual number, total growth over that period is about 20%, but median income shrank. Where did that money go? If nothing else this should put a final nail in the coffin of "supply-side" economics. The idea that if the rich have more money, they invest creating better jobs is garbage. They don't. They may invest, but they don't do so in new companies, they don't do so in banks where the money gets loaned back out (more on that one in a second) they like to stick it in their portfolio where the money goes to rot, chasing other people's money around in little circles, but not actually out in the economy (what the Fed used to call M3, but which they stopped publishing in 2006 because "M3 does not appear to convey any additional information about economic activity that is not already embodied in M2 and has not played a role in the monetary policy process for many years." Well it may not have much of a role in monetary policy, but as we're seeing, it has enormous economic impacts, and appears to be where all that growth went, since it obviously didn't go into the pocket of anyone in the bottom half of US households.

Now here is where things start to get really messy. It used to be illegal for BANKS to play around in the markets. This came up out of the 1929 crash which caused banks to go belly up taking everything their depositors had with them. They'd made market investments and when the market tanked, so did they. This changed in 1999. What's happening now is the banks involved in that kind of trading are the same ones who are tanking because of the sub-prime mortgage mess, and on the edge of the credit card mess that's getting ready to land. This ALL goes back to the mantra of supply-side economics, let the rich invest to create.

Well aside from maybe Edison and the art communities, I don't know of anyone who creates without there being some sort of demand for something. We're in this mess because of a theory of economics which has now been shown by hard numbers to have as much validity as intelligent design.

RE: Charting various aspects of life of last 8 years