Worst President Ever?

[Nightwing 0]

I'm not sure that Bush clears the top ten mark. He's pretty bad, but there are a lot of Presidents who are far worse. I don't care what you think of the Iraq war, Buchanan not challenging secession is on a whole different scale of "What the fuck are you THINKING?!" At the very least, I can figure out numerous reasons (Good and Bad) why Iraq might seem like a good idea. But allowing secession and letting the South take Union armories and such without any sort of fight? What the fuck.

 

I'd put people like Hoover, Harding, Wilson (Not just a racist, but he was completely inept at handling Versailles. It was nice that he was an idealist, but he was too up his own ass about and his failure at Versailles caused a multitude of problems in the future), Taylor (Who was a retard), Grant... really, that entire stretch of guys after Van Buren but before Lincoln were probably worse. Hayes could be considered worse. Andrew Jackson, depending on whether you think he's absolutely insane or not, as well as his attrocities concerning Native Americans.

 

Really, I'd put Bush at the lower end of the middle of the pack, where I'd put most of the recent Presidents. Between 25-29, approximately.

[BruiserKC 0]

History will really tell how Bush fares. For example...after reading David Halberstam's "The Fifties" people at that time considered Truman a horrible president. Yet today people consider him a good one. Lincoln wasn't the most popular either back during the Civil War, yet now history considers him one of our best presidents.

[EricMM 0]

I am of the opinion that the future societies will see Bush Jr. in a worse light than we see him now.

 

Jackson is definitely up there in my book as one of the worst.

 

But in terms of worst presidents of the 20th century? Bush has to be aces, in close contention with Reagan, Nixon, and Carter, I guess.

 

I mean, it's all personal. Some people absolutely hate Kennedy and FDR too so...

[snuffbox 0]

I'm always amazed at people giving Nixon credit for ending Vietnam. By 'amazed', of course, I mean 'saddened'. Nixon could have allowed the Paris Peace Talks to end the war in either 1968 or '69 but instead decided to continue the war for FOUR MORE YEARS, and attack both Cambodia and Laos, then finally let it end under the EXACT SAME TERMS that would have been reached in 68/69. He cost an additional near 30,000 American deaths, fosterd Kent State, and that Cambodian thing had some pretty grisly effects down the road. And there was that whole Kissinger-in-Paris thing in 1968, too.

 

America had another opportunity to shave a few months off the war in 1972 but instead chose to believe the Nixon campaign that George McGovern, one of the great World War 2 pilots, was a dope-smoking hippie.

 

I still don't get why the historical comebacks, so to speak, of Truman or Lincoln matter at all to Bush Jr's future. Neither of those guys left an entire region completely shattered (after it was already dangerously unstable to begin with). None of those guy let a guy orchestrate an attack on American soil, kill thousands of people, and get away. Look at the economy, recession for his first few years and we're either going into one now or already there (could easily go beyond recession, and soon). Has Hoover turned a historical comeback yet? And then there's the whole record-deficit thing that we will be paying for decades.

[snuffbox 0]

Let's not try to compare the South to Iraq either. I dont want to have to call anyone a John Boehner.

[Nightwing 0]

]

But in terms of worst presidents of the 20th century? Bush has to be aces, in close contention with Reagan, Nixon, and Carter, I guess.

 

Naw, you're forgetting the earlier part of the century. Wilson, Harding, Hoover, and maybe even Coolidge (depending on how you look at him). I'd put Reagan past the half-way point, but only by a spot or two. We are also forgetting LBJ, here. There are a lot of controversial president's nowadays... I think that's why Kennedy always gets a fairly high rating, even though he really didn't do that much, or succeed. He just was a pretty face that occupied the spot for a while... but in comparison to some of the other Presidents out there, I suppose that's an improvement!

 

And I kinda liked Jackson's craziness, as it did sometimes work out. At the very least, he completely shut up the 'nullification' crowd with a toast and a recruitment ad. How can't you love that?

[snuffbox 0]

Yeah, and that whole bank thing really panned out well!

[Guest Pizza Hut's Game Face]

Bush has to be aces, in close contention with Reagan

oh get the fuck out

[Nightwing 0]

Yeah, and that whole bank thing really panned out well!

 

I never said it worked out ALL the time. But it's entertaining to read about nowadays, isn't it?

[snuffbox 0]

While Reagan doesn't deserve all the credit for ending the Cold War, he does deserve plenty. And he managed to do it without a ground war. He did have alot of corruption in his Administration and if people indict Harding/Grant for that then they must also indict Reagan. Personally, I feel that Cabinet/Administration corruption takes a backseat to Executive corruption/horrible policy.

 

Reagan was a middle-of-the-pack, 'good' President.

[snuffbox 0]

Yeah, and that whole bank thing really panned out well!

 

I never said it worked out ALL the time. But it's entertaining to read about nowadays, isn't it?

 

Oh yeah, hella entertaining dude.

 

Maybe not so much for the people living at the time or the 30 years after that the Bank destruction badly effected. Hands down, it was the worst economic decision any President has ever made. Or for the Natives on the 'trail of tears' that Jackson forced over a Supreme Court ruling. I'm not sure how entertained they were along the way.

 

LBJ entertains me too. He was even recorded saying "bunghole"! Too bad his policies killed tens of thousands of Americans, continue to effect subsequent generations, and, fiscally, he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground (to use his vernacular).

[Your Paragon of Virtue 0]

But it's hilarious! Clearly that takes precedence over any real-life consequences of their decisions.

 

Most of the environmental policies created by Nixon are shams, have been largely ineffective, and in some cases have seriously infringed on some people's living spaces.

[PLAGIARISM! 0]

Whether it's directly Bush's fault or not, I feel I should skip across the pond and take liberties with your limp-wristed dollar against my muscular ££££'s.

[Nightwing 0]

The only person who really deserves credit for bringing down the Soviet Union is Brezhnev, really. And Reagan's a fine, inoffensive President.

 

I always wondered how Eisenhower got rated so high as well. I mean, you have the Interstate Highway Act (Or whatever it was called, I can't remember it off the top of my head), but I always thought that his utterly ignoring of most of the social problems at the time would put him lower. But he's always in the upper-middle range of Presidents. *Shrugs*

[snuffbox 0]

Eisenhower was incredibly popular (against almost any other GOP opponent, Adlai would have won) & nothing really terrible happened during his terms. The 1950s are remembered as our lovely Leave It To Beaver era, no matter what the actual social/counterculture/racial situation actually was at the time. He also gets bonus points from many people for World War Two.

 

Plenty of people were/are offended by some of Reagan's paleolithic decisions, his inability to handle corruption, and rumored racism. He was good but far from inoffensive.

[EricMM 0]

Reagan seriously, seriously gimped the environmental movement in America from the 80's to the present.

 

We could be the leaders in solar and wind power, instead of China and Germany respectively, but he directly chose Oil and Coal in lieu of the others.

[snuffbox 0]

Have there really been any 'good' environmental Presidents other than Teddy Rooselvelt?

[EricMM 0]

Well....

 

Gore

[snuffbox 0]

I shudder to think how Nixon would have handled 1960 if it had been as transparently bogus as 2000.

[Nightwing 0]

Is there any President more universally loved than Teddy Roosevelt? I mean, you have Washington, and then maybe Lincoln... but after that, are there really any others?

[King Kamala 0]

FDR maybe?

 

Teddy Roosevelt is probably my favorite- not just for the stuff he did in office but just because he seemed like such a badass.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

FDR has been revised into an evil socialist who lucked into World War II by a lot of modern conservatives.

[snuffbox 0]

The whole FDR-as-socialist/communist thing is incredibly dumb. The guy literally saved capitalism after the conservatives (Hoover largely) watched as America moved dangerously close to revolution during the Depression.

 

It is as dumb as Y2Jerk (remember him?) blaming World War Two on Warren Harding.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

I don't like Teddy's imperialism.

 

I really don't like what Reagan did (in Latin America especially), but he was very successful overall, beloved, and not anywhere near as disastrous for the country as Bush Jr.

[ZGangsta 0]

The only person who really deserves credit for bringing down the Soviet Union is Brezhnev, really. And Reagan's a fine, inoffensive President.

 

I always wondered how Eisenhower got rated so high as well. I mean, you have the Interstate Highway Act (Or whatever it was called, I can't remember it off the top of my head), but I always thought that his utterly ignoring of most of the social problems at the time would put him lower. But he's always in the upper-middle range of Presidents. *Shrugs*

I think Ike gets props more for being 'Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe' Eisenhower than President Eisenhower. He also got lots of criticism for not paying much attention to civil rights. But when he did get into that, it was pretty big stuff. Like supporting Brown v. Board of Education and sending the 101st Airborne to Little Rock during that whole deal.

 

Reagan had voodoo economics fucking up the debt and contra. So right there I wouldn't say he was a good president. Plus the AIDS stuff. And yes, he doesn't deserve a fraction of the credit he gets for the Cold War.

Personally I think Reagan is worshiped way WAY too much by today's conservatives, but also demonized too much by others.

 

W Bush is easily the worst post WWII president though. The deficits, completely dividing the country, insane corruption (though that's seemed to be pretty symptomatic of the people at the top of the Republican party) and abuse of executive power. Oh yeah, and Iraq. However, if the Middle East miraculously stabalizes in the next couple decades though, he'll probably get turned into a hero by some. Even though it will have nothing to do with him.

[EricMM 0]

To put the economy into better words than I have:

 

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feature...2?currentPage=1

 

E-Mail Print RSS Reckoning

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy. A Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz, sees a generation-long struggle to recoup.

by Joseph E. Stiglitz December 2007

 

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

 

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

 

And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.

 

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

 

Remember the Surplus?

The world was a very different place, economically speaking, when George W. Bush took office, in January 2001. During the Roaring 90s, many had believed that the Internet would transform everything. Productivity gains, which had averaged about 1.5 percent a year from the early 1970s through the early 90s, now approached 3 percent. During Bill Clinton’s second term, gains in manufacturing productivity sometimes even surpassed 6 percent. The Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, spoke of a New Economy marked by continued productivity gains as the Internet buried the old ways of doing business. Others went so far as to predict an end to the business cycle. Greenspan worried aloud about how he’d ever be able to manage monetary policy once the nation’s debt was fully paid off.

 

This tremendous confidence took the Dow Jones index higher and higher. The rich did well, but so did the not-so-rich and even the downright poor. The Clinton years were not an economic Nirvana; as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during part of this time, I’m all too aware of mistakes and lost opportunities. The global-trade agreements we pushed through were often unfair to developing countries. We should have invested more in infrastructure, tightened regulation of the securities markets, and taken additional steps to promote energy conservation. We fell short because of politics and lack of money—and also, frankly, because special interests sometimes shaped the agenda more than they should have. But these boom years were the first time since Jimmy Carter that the deficit was under control. And they were the first time since the 1970s that incomes at the bottom grew faster than those at the top—a benchmark worth celebrating.

 

By the time George W. Bush was sworn in, parts of this bright picture had begun to dim. The tech boom was over. The nasdaq fell 15 percent in the single month of April 2000, and no one knew for sure what effect the collapse of the Internet bubble would have on the real economy. It was a moment ripe for Keynesian economics, a time to prime the pump by spending more money on education, technology, and infrastructure—all of which America desperately needed, and still does, but which the Clinton administration had postponed in its relentless drive to eliminate the deficit. Bill Clinton had left President Bush in an ideal position to pursue such policies. Remember the presidential debates in 2000 between Al Gore and George Bush, and how the two men argued over how to spend America’s anticipated $2.2 trillion budget surplus? The country could well have afforded to ramp up domestic investment in key areas. In fact, doing so would have staved off recession in the short run while spurring growth in the long run.

 

But the Bush administration had its own ideas. The first major economic initiative pursued by the president was a massive tax cut for the rich, enacted in June of 2001. Those with incomes over a million got a tax cut of $18,000—more than 30 times larger than the cut received by the average American. The inequities were compounded by a second tax cut, in 2003, this one skewed even more heavily toward the rich. Together these tax cuts, when fully implemented and if made permanent, mean that in 2012 the average reduction for an American in the bottom 20 percent will be a scant $45, while those with incomes of more than $1 million will see their tax bills reduced by an average of $162,000.

 

The administration crows that the economy grew—by some 16 percent—during its first six years, but the growth helped mainly people who had no need of any help, and failed to help those who need plenty. A rising tide lifted all yachts. Inequality is now widening in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century. A young male in his 30s today has an income, adjusted for inflation, that is 12 percent less than what his father was making 30 years ago. Some 5.3 million more Americans are living in poverty now than were living in poverty when Bush became president. America’s class structure may not have arrived there yet, but it’s heading in the direction of Brazil’s and Mexico’s.

 

The Bankruptcy Boom

In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous “war of choice” in Iraq. A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II.

 

Agricultural subsidies were doubled between 2002 and 2005. Tax expenditures—the vast system of subsidies and preferences hidden in the tax code—increased more than a quarter. Tax breaks for the president’s friends in the oil-and-gas industry increased by billions and billions of dollars. Yes, in the five years after 9/11, defense expenditures did increase (by some 70 percent), though much of the growth wasn’t helping to fight the War on Terror at all, but was being lost or outsourced in failed missions in Iraq. Meanwhile, other funds continued to be spent on the usual high-tech gimcrackery—weapons that don’t work, for enemies we don’t have. In a nutshell, money was being spent everyplace except where it was needed. During these past seven years the percentage of G.D.P. spent on research and development outside defense and health has fallen. Little has been done about our decaying infrastructure—be it levees in New Orleans or bridges in Minneapolis. Coping with most of the damage will fall to the next occupant of the White House.

 

Although it railed against entitlement programs for the needy, the administration enacted the largest increase in entitlements in four decades—the poorly designed Medicare prescription-drug benefit, intended as both an election-season bribe and a sop to the pharmaceutical industry. As internal documents later revealed, the true cost of the measure was hidden from Congress. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies received special favors. To access the new benefits, elderly patients couldn’t opt to buy cheaper medications from Canada or other countries. The law also prohibited the U.S. government, the largest single buyer of prescription drugs, from negotiating with drug manufacturers to keep costs down. As a result, American consumers pay far more for medications than people elsewhere in the developed world.

 

You’ll still hear some—and, loudly, the president himself—argue that the administration’s tax cuts were meant to stimulate the economy, but this was never true. The bang for the buck—the amount of stimulus per dollar of deficit—was astonishingly low. Therefore, the job of economic stimulation fell to the Federal Reserve Board, which stepped on the accelerator in a historically unprecedented way, driving interest rates down to 1 percent. In real terms, taking inflation into account, interest rates actually dropped to negative 2 percent. The predictable result was a consumer spending spree. Looked at another way, Bush’s own fiscal irresponsibility fostered irresponsibility in everyone else. Credit was shoveled out the door, and subprime mortgages were made available to anyone this side of life support. Credit-card debt mounted to a whopping $900 billion by the summer of 2007. “Qualified at birth” became the drunken slogan of the Bush era. American households took advantage of the low interest rates, signed up for new mortgages with “teaser” initial rates, and went to town on the proceeds.

 

All of this spending made the economy look better for a while; the president could (and did) boast about the economic statistics. But the consequences for many families would become apparent within a few years, when interest rates rose and mortgages proved impossible to repay. The president undoubtedly hoped the reckoning would come sometime after 2008. It arrived 18 months early. As many as 1.7 million Americans are expected to lose their homes in the months ahead. For many, this will mean the beginning of a downward spiral into poverty.

 

Between March 2006 and March 2007 personal-bankruptcy rates soared more than 60 percent. As families went into bankruptcy, more and more of them came to understand who had won and who had lost as a result of the president’s 2005 bankruptcy bill, which made it harder for individuals to discharge their debts in a reasonable way. The lenders that had pressed for “reform” had been the clear winners, gaining added leverage and protections for themselves; people facing financial distress got the shaft.

 

And Then There’s Iraq

The war in Iraq (along with, to a lesser extent, the war in Afghanistan) has cost the country dearly in blood and treasure. The loss in lives can never be quantified. As for the treasure, it’s worth calling to mind that the administration, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, was reluctant to venture an estimate of what the war would cost (and publicly humiliated a White House aide who suggested that it might run as much as $200 billion). When pressed to give a number, the administration suggested $50 billion—what the United States is actually spending every few months. Today, government figures officially acknowledge that more than half a trillion dollars total has been spent by the U.S. “in theater.” But in fact the overall cost of the conflict could be quadruple that amount—as a study I did with Linda Bilmes of Harvard has pointed out—even as the Congressional Budget Office now concedes that total expenditures are likely to be more than double the spending on operations. The official numbers do not include, for instance, other relevant expenditures hidden in the defense budget, such as the soaring costs of recruitment, with re-enlistment bonuses of as much as $100,000. They do not include the lifetime of disability and health-care benefits that will be required by tens of thousands of wounded veterans, as many as 20 percent of whom have suffered devastating brain and spinal injuries. Astonishingly, they do not include much of the cost of the equipment that has been used in the war, and that will have to be replaced. If you also take into account the costs to the economy from higher oil prices and the knock-on effects of the war—for instance, the depressing domino effect that war-fueled uncertainty has on investment, and the difficulties U.S. firms face overseas because America is the most disliked country in the world—the total costs of the Iraq war mount, even by a conservative estimate, to at least $2 trillion. To which one needs to add these words: so far.

 

It is natural to wonder, What would this money have bought if we had spent it on other things? U.S. aid to all of Africa has been hovering around $5 billion a year, the equivalent of less than two weeks of direct Iraq-war expenditures. The president made a big deal out of the financial problems facing Social Security, but the system could have been repaired for a century with what we have bled into the sands of Iraq. Had even a fraction of that $2 trillion been spent on investments in education and technology, or improving our infrastructure, the country would be in a far better position economically to meet the challenges it faces in the future, including threats from abroad. For a sliver of that $2 trillion we could have provided guaranteed access to higher education for all qualified Americans.

 

The soaring price of oil is clearly related to the Iraq war. The issue is not whether to blame the war for this but simply how much to blame it. It seems unbelievable now to recall that Bush-administration officials before the invasion suggested not only that Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for the war in its entirety—hadn’t we actually turned a tidy profit from the 1991 Gulf War?—but also that war was the best way to ensure low oil prices. In retrospect, the only big winners from the war have been the oil companies, the defense contractors, and al-Qaeda. Before the war, the oil markets anticipated that the then price range of $20 to $25 a barrel would continue for the next three years or so. Market players expected to see more demand from China and India, sure, but they also anticipated that this greater demand would be met mostly by increased production in the Middle East. The war upset that calculation, not so much by curtailing oil production in Iraq, which it did, but rather by heightening the sense of insecurity everywhere in the region, suppressing future investment.

 

The continuing reliance on oil, regardless of price, points to one more administration legacy: the failure to diversify America’s energy resources. Leave aside the environmental reasons for weaning the world from hydrocarbons—the president has never convincingly embraced them, anyway. The economic and national-security arguments ought to have been powerful enough. Instead, the administration has pursued a policy of “drain America first”—that is, take as much oil out of America as possible, and as quickly as possible, with as little regard for the environment as one can get away with, leaving the country even more dependent on foreign oil in the future, and hope against hope that nuclear fusion or some other miracle will come to the rescue. So many gifts to the oil industry were included in the president’s 2003 energy bill that John McCain referred to it as the “No Lobbyist Left Behind” bill.

 

Contempt for the World

America’s budget and trade deficits have grown to record highs under President Bush. To be sure, deficits don’t have to be crippling in and of themselves. If a business borrows to buy a machine, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. During the past six years, America—its government, its families, the country as a whole—has been borrowing to sustain its consumption. Meanwhile, investment in fixed assets—the plants and equipment that help increase our wealth—has been declining.

 

What’s the impact of all this down the road? The growth rate in America’s standard of living will almost certainly slow, and there could even be a decline. The American economy can take a lot of abuse, but no economy is invincible, and our vulnerabilities are plain for all to see. As confidence in the American economy has plummeted, so has the value of the dollar—by 40 percent against the euro since 2001.

 

The disarray in our economic policies at home has parallels in our economic policies abroad. President Bush blamed the Chinese for our huge trade deficit, but an increase in the value of the yuan, which he has pushed, would simply make us buy more textiles and apparel from Bangladesh and Cambodia instead of China; our deficit would remain unchanged. The president claimed to believe in free trade but instituted measures aimed at protecting the American steel industry. The United States pushed hard for a series of bilateral trade agreements and bullied smaller countries into accepting all sorts of bitter conditions, such as extending patent protection on drugs that were desperately needed to fight aids. We pressed for open markets around the world but prevented China from buying Unocal, a small American oil company, most of whose assets lie outside the United States.

 

Not surprisingly, protests over U.S. trade practices erupted in places such as Thailand and Morocco. But America has refused to compromise—refused, for instance, to take any decisive action to do away with our huge agricultural subsidies, which distort international markets and hurt poor farmers in developing countries. This intransigence led to the collapse of talks designed to open up international markets. As in so many other areas, President Bush worked to undermine multilateralism—the notion that countries around the world need to cooperate—and to replace it with an America-dominated system. In the end, he failed to impose American dominance—but did succeed in weakening cooperation.

 

The administration’s basic contempt for global institutions was underscored in 2005 when it named Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense and a chief architect of the Iraq war, as president of the World Bank. Widely distrusted from the outset, and soon caught up in personal controversy, Wolfowitz became an international embarrassment and was forced to resign his position after less than two years on the job.

 

Globalization means that America’s economy and the rest of the world have become increasingly interwoven. Consider those bad American mortgages. As families default, the owners of the mortgages find themselves holding worthless pieces of paper. The originators of these problem mortgages had already sold them to others, who packaged them, in a non-transparent way, with other assets, and passed them on once again to unidentified others. When the problems became apparent, global financial markets faced real tremors: it was discovered that billions in bad mortgages were hidden in portfolios in Europe, China, and Australia, and even in star American investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns. Indonesia and other developing countries—innocent bystanders, really—suffered as global risk premiums soared, and investors pulled money out of these emerging markets, looking for safer havens. It will take years to sort out this mess.

 

Meanwhile, we have become dependent on other nations for the financing of our own debt. Today, China alone holds more than $1 trillion in public and private American I.O.U.’s. Cumulative borrowing from abroad during the six years of the Bush administration amounts to some $5 trillion. Most likely these creditors will not call in their loans—if they ever did, there would be a global financial crisis. But there is something bizarre and troubling about the richest country in the world not being able to live even remotely within its means. Just as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have eroded America’s moral authority, so the Bush administration’s fiscal housekeeping has eroded our economic authority.

 

The Way Forward

Whoever moves into the White House in January 2009 will face an unenviable set of economic circumstances. Extricating the country from Iraq will be the bloodier task, but putting America’s economic house in order will be wrenching and take years.

 

The most immediate challenge will be simply to get the economy’s metabolism back into the normal range. That will mean moving from a savings rate of zero (or less) to a more typical savings rate of, say, 4 percent. While such an increase would be good for the long-term health of America’s economy, the short-term consequences would be painful. Money saved is money not spent. If people don’t spend money, the economic engine stalls. If households curtail their spending quickly—as they may be forced to do as a result of the meltdown in the mortgage market—this could mean a recession; if done in a more measured way, it would still mean a protracted slowdown. The problems of foreclosure and bankruptcy posed by excessive household debt are likely to get worse before they get better. And the federal government is in a bind: any quick restoration of fiscal sanity will only aggravate both problems.

 

And in any case there’s more to be done. What is required is in some ways simple to describe: it amounts to ceasing our current behavior and doing exactly the opposite. It means not spending money that we don’t have, increasing taxes on the rich, reducing corporate welfare, strengthening the safety net for the less well off, and making greater investment in education, technology, and infrastructure.

 

When it comes to taxes, we should be trying to shift the burden away from things we view as good, such as labor and savings, to things we view as bad, such as pollution. With respect to the safety net, we need to remember that the more the government does to help workers improve their skills and get affordable health care the more we free up American businesses to compete in the global economy. Finally, we’ll be a lot better off if we work with other countries to create fair and efficient global trade and financial systems. We’ll have a better chance of getting others to open up their markets if we ourselves act less hypocritically—that is, if we open our own markets to their goods and stop subsidizing American agriculture.

 

Some portion of the damage done by the Bush administration could be rectified quickly. A large portion will take decades to fix—and that’s assuming the political will to do so exists both in the White House and in Congress. Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated. And think of the widening divide between rich and poor in America, a phenomenon that goes beyond economics and speaks to the very future of the American Dream.

 

In short, there’s a momentum here that will require a generation to reverse. Decades hence we should take stock, and revisit the conventional wisdom. Will Herbert Hoover still deserve his dubious mantle? I’m guessing that George W. Bush will have earned one more grim superlative.

 

Anya Schiffrin and Izzet Yildiz assisted with research for this article.

 

Worth a read, seriously.

[King Kamala 0]

FDR has been revised into an evil socialist who lucked into World War II by a lot of modern conservatives.

 

Should've remembered that cause my 11th grade U.S. history teacher was one of said conservatives. Cool guy though despite some of his ludicrous opinions.

 

I don't know if I'd count TR as a universally beloved president due to the aforementioned imperialism but he probably is the closest thing to one besides Washington, Lincoln, and maybe Jefferson.

[Nightwing 0]

The whole FDR-as-socialist/communist thing is incredibly dumb. The guy literally saved capitalism after the conservatives (Hoover largely) watched as America moved dangerously close to revolution during the Depression.

 

I always thought of him as the accidental socialist, in that he did institute what could be considered Socialist programs (NRA is... well, that's probably his most extreme legislation, but it deserves mention) but it stopped, as you say, what could have been a social revolution. He never really ended the Depression, but I have to say that he stabilized things and certainly made people feel a helluva lot better, which held us over.

 

It is as dumb as Y2Jerk (remember him?) blaming World War Two on Warren Harding.

 

I want to hear this argument.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

I always thought of him as the accidental socialist, in that he did institute what could be considered Socialist programs (NRA is... well, that's probably his most extreme legislation, but it deserves mention) but it stopped, as you say, what could have been a social revolution.

 

Czech crucified me one time for making this argument.

[Nightwing 0]

I always thought of him as the accidental socialist, in that he did institute what could be considered Socialist programs (NRA is... well, that's probably his most extreme legislation, but it deserves mention) but it stopped, as you say, what could have been a social revolution.

 

Czech crucified me one time for making this argument.

 

Well, it's true. I mean, at the time the Soviet Propaganda machine was making Russia look ridiculously good, since they were cut off from the World Economy long before the Depression happened. I mean, Communism looked pretty good at the time. Without some radical stop-gap maneuvers, the US wouldn't have lasted in that state. I mean, it's not the same as saying FDR's policies would have been good outside that situation (They didn't stop the Depression or lead us to new Golden Age), but at the time, they gave the people stability and hope. We needed that.