The Good Times Are Killing Me

Republicans are better for business, for the economy, right? That's the unassailable common wisdom, right?

Well, not so much.

It turns out the Common Wisdom is wrong as Rick Santorum's dog; turns out common wisdom is dumb as a bag of hammers.

Not only has BushCo not been able to run the country like a business, they've run it into a tree, where the tree fell over, hit the house, which started on fire, then exploded, then fell into the hole created by the tree falling over.

And then it was demolished by Vogons.

When the car and house were not being actively stripped by their best friends, to be sold to chop-shops for drug money.



No. really, look closely at that graph. Not only did Bush and cronies start with a booming economy, they had an unprecedentedly efficient government, racking up surpluses and managing the country's debt, the almost instantaneously turned it around by giving anything not nailed down away to their corporate buddies. After precipitously falling since the takeover, it is now the largest and most rapidly increasing deficit in our history, and there's nothing indicating it will be changing anytime soon.

Look, this refrain about the current booming economy is bullshit, smoke and mirrors. It's an artificial metric, buoyed by Wall Street's blind optimism based on the limited paper improvements being registered by cost cutting and profit taking by corporate cronies of the Administration, and the record profits being fueled by government giveaways in certain industries, like oil and pharmaceuticals. By any reasonable standards, things are not going well, and the illusion of prosperity coupled with a blind ideological refusal to acknowledge underlying structural deficiencies is only going to make the eventual fall that much more abrupt and harmful, especially to people in the middle class.

It's only a matter of time before foreign debtors start resisting financing this foolishness, and then the costs of racking up this kind of debt will be increasing even faster. At that point, the ability to turn it around becomes nearly impossible, and disaster looms. This isn't just a matter of spending that every administration is guilty of; this is heading into totally uncharted waters here.