Click HERE if you're interested.
I also wanted to provide a link to Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz's informative essay entitled "The $10 Trillion Hangover: Paying the Price for Eight Years of Bush," but Harper's will only give online access to current subscribers like me. That article by the former assistant secretary for administration, management, and budget within the Department of Commerce and a Nobel Prize winner in economics is sobering.
I will provide some passages of note though:
"The worst legacy of the past eight years is that despite colossal government spending, most Americans are worse off than they were in 2001. This is because money was squandered in Iraq and given as a tax windfall to America's richest individuals and corporations, rather than spent on such projects as education, infrastructure, and energy independence, which would have made all of us better in the long term."
"The Obama Administration, facing the most serious economic crisis in at least a generation, will need to mount an expansionary fiscal policy. The problem is how much the country's debt mountain will crimp our ability to pay for the type of change we just voted for--better health care, public investment in alternative forms of energy, and a renewal of our aging roads and bridges--and that we need in order to rescue the economy."
"Whether we struggle to break our addiction to deficit spending in order to pay off our debts, or wind up inflating them away, the economic mistakes of the George W. Bush White House will cast a long shadow over the next generation of Americans."
That history will not vindicate the Bush administration.
Good luck, President Obama.
2 comments:
As much as I dislike Bush, I will reserve my final judgement. However, it is hard to imagine that history will judge him kindly.
That said, "Obama Fever" has me scared, too. I think too many people view him as an immediate solution to fix all of our domestic and foreign problems. I don't that's fair.
Sometimes I wonder whether his critics are correct by calling him a celebrity. The concert on the National Mall yesterday was strange to me.
There's certainly a "cult of personality" thing going on (Ah, what a great song).
With that said, he can and does inspire people with his rhetoric. It'll now be a matter of putting words into action.
One of my favorite writers, H.L. Mencken, had similar concerns about FDR and his use of rhetoric to persuade the American people. But, hey, I've always liked FDR. He's probably my favorite President.
I didn't see the concert, but I read that 89-year old Pete Seeger sang "This Land Is Your Land," a song that is much better than the pomp and circumstance of "America the Beautiful." I'm all for that.
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