Chapter 10 - The Parade (100-101)

A Chronicle of the Age of Consequences __________________________________ 100

financial meltdown hits;

Servicing this new debt will cost American families $2000 a year, year after year, forever;
The national debt is now 70% of the GDP, the highest in fifty years;
The share of public debt owed to foreign nationals has risen from 31% in 2001 to 46% today.

"The outgoing administration has made a series of unwise economic choices that together will add up to a burdensome legacy," they write. They calculate that bill for Bush-era spending – new debt + new obligations – amounts to $10 trillion, a mammoth and unprecedented number. When Bush took office he inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion. What happened next, according to Bilmes and Stiglitz, was this: the administration pushed through two massive, inequitable tax cuts and increased government spending by 59%, surging the deficit to a projected $1.2 trillion by the end of 2008, with more red ink on the way.

"Whether we struggle to break our addiction to deficit spending in order to pay off our debts, or wind up inflating them away," they write, "the economic mistakes of the George W. Bush White House will cast a long shadow over the next generation of Americans."

Then there is the role that the Bush administration played in the housing mortgage crisis itself and the subsequent economic atomic blast that has devastated the nation. Indicators suggest Bush and Co. dropped the regulatory ball big time, thereby allowing all sorts of corporate greed and malfeasance to spiral out-of-control on Wall Street. The administration denies it did

Chapter 10 - The Parade ______________________________________________ 101

anything wrong, of course, but the fact remains: this crisis happened on Bush's watch, which means he will bear the burden of its legacy. More importantly, the crisis happened, in my opinion, as a result of Bush's promotion of a laissez-faire capitalist ideology at odds with the real world (including real – not modeled or idealized – human behavior).

Despite this catastrophic 'market failure,' the President remains typically unrepentant.

In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on November 15th, 2008, titled: "The Surest Path Back to Prosperity," Bush wrote: "the long-term solution to today's problems is sustained economic growth. And the surest path to that growth is free markets and free people…The record is unmistakable: If you seek economic growth, social justice and human dignity, the free market is the way to go. It would be a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success."

Viva La Fiesta.

Which brings me to what President Bush did not accomplish in eight years: no reform of Social Security and Medicare, which are due to go bankrupt in a decade or so; no reform of the nation's dependence on foreign oil, including no new steps toward anything resembling renewable energy (the administration moved quietly in the opposite direction, in fact); no attempt to tackle runaway health care costs, which are stabbing average Americans through their checkbooks; and nothing substantial on the environment front, despite important signs that we're facing an ecological crisis of serious proportions.