From HP:
"[T]he policies put in place by the previous administration, prior to this great recession, have left us with a terrible legacy of challenges," Geithner said during a discussion on fiscal policy at the Washington-based Center for American Progress. "And America is a less equal country today than it was ten years ago, in part because of the tax cuts for the top 2 percent put in place in 2001 and 2003."
The Bush tax cuts, credited with job creation during the George W. Bush administration, are now credited with expanding the nation's ever-increasing national debt. More jobs have been destroyed than the tax cuts could ever claim to have created, and with the economy in a moderate recovery the tax cuts have become less an economic issue than a political one:
Most Republicans, hoping to push their supply-side theories, want to extend them in hopes that the rich will spend, invest and create jobs in the process; Democrats, in an attempt to appeal to deficit-conscious voters, want them to expire so that the increased government revenue can be used to pay down the national debt.
Why is it that every revelation in this country comes five to ten years too late? Why is it that human beings can't sniff out disaster and ill will before it affects them?
Having lived through a few recessions, the one's through the Bush years have been particularly different. In my own career, salaries remained stagnant until they finally started ticking upward around 2007. Then, of course, we had the second half of the Bush years - and the result of his self-centered tax cuts and monitoring-free policies.
As I mentioned yesterday, I have many friends who are in finance. All of them are either middle or top management at Banks and Financial firms in Manhattan. All except one are doing spectacularly and, for that matter, have benefitted greatly during the Bush years.
Myself? Well, I do fine. Passable. Not as well as some of them, but that's hardly the point. I used to pay my freelancers $45 an hour in 2000. Those same type of employees I pay $40 today, not because I'm cheap, but the value of our product has gone down over these last 10 years or so due to a lulled economy (in addition to a good deal of India outsourcing by others that has affected us dramatically). I make considerably less, so they make considerably less. My basic salary hasn't dramatically changed (short of one year, 2005) in all this time, not because I haven't actively looked for clients but because all my clients have lesser budgets than they had in 2000, and even with three more than I had in 2003, I make less overall. Fortunately, unlike others, I bought a house I could afford and live by the theory that in the worst of times, even if we had to work at Burger King, I could still afford the mortgage. Today, I don't even think the BK jobs are that easy to come by.
What these last 12 or so years have felt like is that the boom through the Clinton years was strangled, terribly strangled, during Bush (unless you work in finance or have government contracts). I never bought the reports of the economy recovering. Sure, the stock market did, but not the rest of us.
More lies from the chimp that are only finally coming out as greater truth. Too bad enough people didn't have the dog sense about him before he first took office. Eight years of a Gore presidency would have been greatly welcomed.