The Bush Recession

The politicians in Washington have a sure-fire plan to cure the credit crisis, which is fomenting a recession: borrow money and lend it to over-stretched consumers so they can continue spending like there is no tomorrow. Of course, the knuckleheads in Washington won’t tell Americans how they are going to pay for the $150 billion dollar stimulus package that aims to give individual taxpayers rebates of up to $800. It sounds good in the same way that a prescription for a gallon of chocolate-chip ice cream per day might sound good to a diabetic, but it is only a way of postponing the inevitable reckoning the occurs to every country that lives well beyond its means.

The Spanish Empire faced a similar predicament under Phillip the II before it crumbled. Spain didn’t manufacture much of anything, but it had more than its fair share of financial "wizards" who continually found clever ways to repackage debt. The Conquistadors, too, were big on plundering gold from the New World (which for a time kept the Spanish Empire afloat), just as the Bush administration was banking on exploiting Iraq’s black gold (in order to break the back of OPEC and keep petroleum prices down) as a way of keeping America’s ailing auto industry afloat.

Getting $150 billion dollars into the hands of American consumers makes a lot more sense than hundreds of billions we’ve spent turning Iraqi into a Disneyland for Islamic extremists. But for the most part, the Bush administration has failed to invest America’s resources in wise ways that will ensure a more prosperous future.

Dick Cheney, of course, once argued that "deficits don’t matter" and that conservation cannot be the sound basis of a national energy policy. According to Cheney’s logic, nations that are getting rich hoarding U.S. Treasury bonds (China) or selling us oil (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) have no other choice but to continue to subsidize our trade deficit, lest we stop buying their products (be they plasma TVs or petroleum). The only problem, of course, is that we are becoming the American Indians who traded Manhattan for beads and trinkets. That is, we are trading our future for lead painted toys, poisoned dog food, and fossil fuels that exacerbate global warming.

Americans are a lot poorer today than they were when Bush took office seven years ago. The price of oil, for instance, has quintupled. And Bush’s massive $1.3 trillion dollar tax cuts exploded the deficit just before huge federal outlays were needed deal with the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rebuilding New Orleans following Katrina. The steep decline in the dollar is an indication that international lenders have lost confidence in the economic and strategic course charted by the Bush administration.

The fiscal stimulus the Bush administration is touting seems suspiciously like the surge in Iraq. That is, both are Band-Aids intended to buy the Bush administration time so that things don’t fall entirely apart until after they are out of office. Make no mistake, the gathering economic storm clouds are a consequence of Bush administration policies that have been bankrupting the country, both morally and fiscally. Tax cuts without fiscal discipline are the economic equivalent of steroids; they confer a temporary advantage, but they weaken the nation’s fiscal health over the long term. But hey, you can’t say you weren’t warned. After all, George W. Bush always said about his tax cuts, "It’s your money, you paid for it."

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