Don’t Fall Prey…

to these types of thinking…

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Now, a few comments about it…

Bush isn’t responsible for terrorists killing citizens any more than Clinton is responsible for Timothy McVeigh. Though our foreign policy definitely shoulders some of the blame…
Bush didn’t lie to anyone. Of course I can’t know his mens rea on the whole Iraq War, but at that time, everyone on the planet believed Iraq was harboring WMD’s. Otherwise, no UN team would have been sent in to look for them, and Hans Blix and the like would never have been such worthy news items. To say that he lied is to assume the worst intent for the sole purpose of demonization of Bush for something over 30 other countries participated in.
You don’t spend tax cuts. Are you starting to see the spin here?
The next dot is very complicated, but just a few points. The securities market is one of the more heavily regulated aspects of our entire economic system. Regulation does not prevent disaster. Look at Enron. The red tape around the activities those guys were engaged in was hundreds of regulation pages thick, and they get away with the biggest embezzlement scam in U.S. history. Stating that regulation could have prevented people from doing things to get around regulation is ridiculous. Do anti-murder laws prevent murder? Additionally, many of the practices that led to the downfall (e.g. bundling high-risk mortgages and selling them as bonds) were not only allowed by the state, but required by it. Look up the Community Reinvestment Act, whcih required banks to give high-risk loans to people who might never pay them off, all in an effort to “help poor people”. Not only did it not help poor people, it screwed over the middle class too when the system came crashing down…
Bush wasn’t forced to do anything concerning that $700 billion in Bailouts. The Bailouts were a bigger mistake than the ones the government made that led to them being needed. If a sector of the market is to fail, other private entities will necessarily fill the vacuum, and at a cheaper and more efficient price. The reason things fail is because they are not either of the above. The government subsidizing failure will not improve our condition, it will make it worse, by rewarding inefficiency and unwieldy practices.
The stimulus started by Bush and expanded ad nauseum by Obama did not work. Keynesianism doesn’t work. It never has. It never will. Almost ALL non-government, non-media economists know this (i.e. all the ones who actually study economics and are familiar with practices instead of generation of ideas). Government spending necessarily takes money out of the market to put it back into the market. Further, government jobs are not real jobs, because they are necessarily supported by the private market, in one way or another – but usually through your taxes.
“Reducing the deficit over 20 years” is a false premise, and it always has been – especially in the way Obama wants to do it, through Medicare spending less. Never fall prey to this type of thinking. The idea is that Obama will cut spending for the next 20 years in order to make up for some of the money we don’t have. In other words, it would be like me telling you I am going to pay off my fully-maxxed-out credit card by not spending all of my income on things that I have bought consistently for the last few years. And money is not stagnant like Obama’s promises to reduce the deficit allude to: “I can say that I can afford to buy a Rolls Royce, without going into debt, by using my inheritance from a rich uncle. But, in the real world, the question would arise immediately whether I in fact have a rich uncle, not to mention whether this hypothetical rich uncle would be likely to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls Royce.” – Tom Sowell
The second point under Obama’s portrait is too vague to be of use.
Finally, the GDP is not the only indication of economic success. The unemployment rate is another good place to start. But there are many other things, too. But the media and the Left still maintain things are getting better because of the stimulus package. And due to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy our finite human brains love, many will always think it worked, just like people who still support the New Deal: