[Bush legacy] Along with low, or no, job growth. Little or no business growth. Depressed wages. And the crashing dollar.

The Fraud of Bushenomics: They’re Looting the Country | by Larry Beinhart | January 19, 2008

The New York Times made it official. The Economy is a problem!
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It's blamed, mostly, on the subprime crisis.

But that's not the problem. It's a symptom. It is the logical, and probably one of the necessary results, of Bushenomics.

Along with low, or no, job growth. Little or no business growth. Depressed wages. And the crashing dollar. (The president has a different vision of the economy. In his vision it's booming! And the number of jobs is growing! Though there is this little blip.)

The idea under which Bushenomics was sold is this:

* The rich are the investor class.
* If the rich have more money, they will invest more.
* Their investments will create more business.
* Those businesses will create more wealth, thus improving everyone's lives and making the nation stronger. They will also create new and better jobs.
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A more realistic -- and less idealistic -- view of Bushenomics is that the Bush administration and its cronies came at the economy with the attitude of oilmen.

* They inherited a vastly wealth country.
* They looked at it like the oil under the Alaskan wilderness. They craved to pump it out, turn it into cash and grab as much of that cash as possible.
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... Our biggest asset -- in terms of size -- is, of course, our defense establishment. With privatization, one dollar out of every three for direct military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan goes to private contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. ...
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This is just an estimate. The degree of privatization is unknown. Presumably, that's deliberate. ...
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But for the most part, the assets of the United States, our collective wealth, could not be sold off in such a direct manner.

In order to turn them into cash, what the administration did was borrow against them.

That is, they cut taxes while continuing to spend lavishly, creating debt.

The debt is owed by all of us, the collective people of the United States.

The tax cuts hugely favored rich people. They also favored unearned income (dividends, capital gains, inherited money) as opposed to the kind of money people have to work for. The very richest got richer.

The spending was -- to the degree possible -- directed to themselves, their friends and their supporters: Big Pharma, the medical industry, insurance, banking and financial, among others. And, of course, Big Oil, from whom they have spent close to a trillion dollars of our money to conquer a big oil field for private exploitation. ...
The big number is that the economy has grown.

As measured by the GDP it has. From 2001 to 2007 it went by 35 percent.
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Now let us look at job creation.

In the first six years of the Clinton administration, 13.7 million jobs were created. In the same period, under Bush, only 3.7 million jobs were created. Barely keeping up with population growth, if that. (Source: Fox News)

Now let us look at median income. That's as opposed to average income (If Bill Gates walks into a bar with 10 people, the average income of everyone in the room goes up by $17,5000,000. But the median income just moves up half a notch, from between the fifth and sixth person, to the sixth person's income). From 2001 to 2005, median income, for people under 65, went down $2,000.
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Now, let's look at the value of America's businesses.

A good rough measure of the market value of America's best businesses is the stock market. Under Clinton, the Dow Jones went up 324 percent. Wall-to-wall, after the dot.com bubble burst, it more than tripled in value.

Bush arrived in 2001. Since then the Dow Jones is up just 10 percent. Adjusted for inflation, that's absolutely flat. (It was briefly up 23 percent. It is now below the 10 percent mark, and tumbling down as this is written). Just pain, no gain.
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The subprime crisis, the housing bubble, whatever you want to call it, is not the problem.

It's a symptom of pumping in money with no place to go.

Other symptoms are no job growth, no business growth, no stock market growth, falling median incomes, disappearing pensions and health plans, and the fall of the dollar.

When Bush came into office, a Euro cost 95 cents. Now it costs a $1.50. The Canadian dollar (the Loony) was 70 cents. Now it costs a dollar. Most mainstream economists and pundits will opine that a low dollar is good for American industry, because it will help us sell our goods. That's only true if we're producing things that no one else is -- or producing them better or cheaper -- and we're not.
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In the real world, there are no such things as free markets.

In the real world, business people manipulate and conspire to control markets, and governments both control and collude with business, while tax policies and government spending have a major affect on the economy.
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