Bush In Denial About the Ecomony
by Pamela LeaveyAs the Dow plunged on Thursday by 387 points, George W. was talking up the economy is his pre-vacation presser. The economy is looking bleaker every day and Bush is claiming it’s as rosy as the progress in Iraq that he is equally in denial about. Here’s the B.S. Bush fed the press corps on the economy Thursday:
When I came into office in 2001, our nation was headed into a recession. So we cut the taxes across the board. And hardworking Americans have used this tax relief to produce strong and lasting economic growth.
Since we began cutting taxes in 2001, our economy has expanded by more than $1.9 trillion. Since the tax cuts took full effect in 2003, our economy has added more than 8.3 million new jobs, and almost four years of uninterrupted growth. Inflation is low, unemployment is low, real after-tax income has grown by an average of more than $3,400 per person since I took office. The American economy is the envy of the world, and we need to keep it that way.
What Bush failed to note is that retail sales have been in a steady decline for a few months now and the latest report shows that Back-to-School Sales haven’t made the grade. Things look bleak across the board as “several industry experts say consumer spending is softening along with the demand for housing,” and they expect the downward trends in retail “to continue through the end of the year, casting a shadow over the important holiday shopping season for the entire industry.”
Dan Froomkin has more on the Bush presser here complete with the double speak about corporate tax cuts. And AP has more on the Dow’s plunge, credit concerns and the “move by the European Central Bank to provide more cash to money markets.” The Federal Reserve also “added a larger-than-normal $24 billion in temporary reserves to the U.S. banking system,” on Thursday.
I don’t know what Bush is smoking but he ain’t folling too many folks with his happy talk about the economy. It’s a house of cards that’s tumbling and this denial crap ain’t helping one darn bit. Newsweek reports that “economists are beginning to worry about America’s credit-card debt” and Bush is claiming “strong and lasting economic growth.”
We’ll all be floating down the river of denial with Bush soon if something doesn’t give.
Enough Is Enough.
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You heard it here first. 4.0% mortgage interest rates by spring. The mortgage industry lost all of its “creative” financing just before x million foreclosure homes are ready to hit the market. If real estate dies, it takes the world economy down with it. OPEC, China, all of them will buy our paper at 4% if that’s what it takes to postpone the day of reckoning staring us in the face.
But back to Bush. Econ 101, nothing stimulates an economy quite like deficit sdending. It wasn’t good policy, it wasn’t magic, it was just plain old borrow and spend, borrow and spend.
Darrell
I’ve never owned a home, may never own a home unless I move to upper Maine where the prices are still low… low… low.
I moved to CA in January 1990 when the economy tanked thanks to Poppy Bush. I’ve seen the writing on the wall now for months – no, a couple of years now. No actually, since JK was running for president, when my business took it’s first dive thanks to Bush’s economic voodoo.