The Bush Years’ Debt Legacy
Feb 27th, 2009 | 9 responses
On Public Radio this morning an economist gave forth with some frightening numbers about this country private debt—credit card and home and business debt, not the public government variety. This private debt load was equal to about 50 percent of GDP in 2000 but had grown to 100 percent of GDP by 2007. And when was the last time private debt was 100 percent of GDP? “1929,” said the economist.
Such numbers by themselves don’t tell the whole story, however. The reason is that debt in and of itself is not a bad thing. If a family goes into deep debt to put its kids through college, for example, the big debt here will likely not only be paid back with great additional benefits to the family and its offspring, but to society as a whole in the form of more productive citizens.
So the question I asked myself after hearing about our private national debt load was this: What is the Bush years’ debt legacy?
Did it somehow morph into massive infrastructure improvements? Into a better educational system? Into bigger and more widely dispensed health care for everyone? Is our military stronger vis-a-vis the rest of the world? Did all the money spent to boost debt so significantly in the Bush years get spread around so it made more Americans richer than they were before the spending began?
The answer to all these questions and a host of others that might come to mind is a resounding “no.” As a nation what we got for all this added debt spending can be neatly summed up in a single word—bupkis, the literal definition of which won’t be given here because this is a family site, but a term that can more politely be rendered as zilch, nada, not a damn thing worth having.
There’s pain, much economic pain, ahead for a great many Americans in the next few years. But perhaps when things begin to look up again and we look back at these years we’ll see a country where recent spending won’t have to be summed up again with the b-word.
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9 Responses to “The Bush Years’ Debt Legacy”
The way you put it makes it sound so benign. What actually happened is we had a professional group of thieves that systematically gutted our Treasury to further the aim of their collective agenda: a hostile corporate takeover of the main resource for their monopoly: Middle East oil., who lied, cheated and stole their way into their shortsided and failed plan to make us pay at the pumps and to keep themselves in their monopoly to gouge us further.
Adding salt to the wound the “mysterious” gas-price hike went to pad their pockets further. My thought is they realized that their little coup wasn't working so they thought they'd get at least something out of the scenario. “Price-speculators” my ass. They were price-fixers, pre-coached talking puppets for BigOil
Since BigOil is recording record profits and once again trying to inch another gouge at the pumps (and blame it this time on inflation), maybe it's time to go in and garnish their profits to pay back those their henchmen stole from: the citizens. If you want to have the government step in and own anything, make it the oil companies. There's getting the weed at the root.
Thank you Michael. Well said.
Worse than bupkis, the greed of the wealthy, skimming trillions from the national treasury and pocketing our kid's money too through massive borrowing, finally proved the stupidity of gluttony. Now no one is better off, not even them.
Of course, I love how the consensus is that the only solution for all of the problems caused by debt is to added another $5 trillion to the national debt and to increase entitlements so that the unfunded liablities grow on future generations.
OK, SD. Your solution, please?
GreenDreams,
the first one would be put a four year moratorium on new entitlement programs, new regulatory schemes, immigration, or new taxes. Let the private sector know that for the next four years, nothing is going to change. Let them know that they will not be regulated out of existence in a few months.
The second part is to move the 20 million illegal aliens out of the U.S. If California and Florida are close to doulbe digit unemployment, the U.S. does not need 20 million illegal aliens competing for those jobs. That would cause wages to increase and create opening for those near the bottom to actually get jobs.
That's what I thought, SD. No new ideas. Might want to check the cost of rounding up and relocating 20 million people. You offering to pay for that? And sure, unbridled greed for the fat cats and unfettered disregard for workers, communities, the environment, the old, young, sick and desperate.
Sounds like China. Flights are cheap. Bon voyage.
Well, illegals don't have to be “rounded up”. There could be stiffer fines imposed on those caught employing them. With nowhere to work, they'd round themselves up and go back home. In the ag industry, low-paid workers are essential to keeping a loaf of bread under $10 so Uncle Sam could step in there and subsidize (american) ag worker's pay to bring them up to the minimum wage of $8/hour.
No other way to look at it. The illegals are sapping our jobs.
G.D. When the Obama Administration is proposing a budget dificit close to 2 trillion, I think some of the stilumus money could be spent removing illegal aliens instead of creating pork programs. Removing 20 million people who have stolen identities, cheated on taxes, and worked for off the book wages will help the economy.
I guess keeping around 20 million people who could be Democratic voters and who demand lots of government services is more important than actually helping the middle class.
SD, “removing illegal aliens” IS a pork program and won't work. We can't even stem the incoming tide, let alone reverse it. And Sil, punishing employers probably won't work either.
I don't care about immigration right now. The massive decline of jobs and manufacturing in the US is not the result of immigration but of policies that rewarded overseas outsourcing and excused multinationals from paying the taxes THEY OWE through tricky bullshit scams like tax-shelter “subsidiaries”.
Face it, we chose to borrow a billion a day from China, grant them most favored nation status, sacrifice our manufacturing sector for cheap Chinese goods and send back 80% of what we borrow as we made them both our banker and manufacturer. Mexicans have nothing to do with killing our textile, shoe, auto, optics, consumer electronics, industrial equipment and hundreds of other industries. We sacrificed them on the altar of “deregulation” and “globalization”. “oh” you say, “but we're a service economy.” Hardly, accounting, Ireland, computer programming, India. Hell, even processing our outrageously expensive health care delivery and writing the checks is outsourced.
Assume all 20 million of them are gone. How does that help us now? Our manufacturing industries are dead. You think picking lettuce is the future American workers yearn for?