Another good Brownstein piece on the failure of Bush’s economic policies:
On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.
[…..]That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The median household income increased during the two terms of Clinton (by 14 per cent, as we’ll see in more detail below), Ronald Reagan (8.1 per cent), and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (3.9 per cent). As Mishel notes, although the global recession decidedly deepened the hole-the percentage decline in the median income from 2007 to 2008 is the largest single year fall on record-average families were already worse off in 2007 than they were in 2000, a remarkable result through an entire business expansion. “What is phenomenal about the years under Bush is that through the entire business cycle from 2000 through 2007, even before this recession…working families were worse off at the end of the recovery, in the best of times during that period, than they were in 2000 before he took office,” Mishel says.
The piece goes on to detail just how dramatically important economic measures improved under Clinton.
One thing I wonder here is to what extent it makes sense to view this in Republican versus Democratic terms. Clinton’s economic policies — particularly when it comes to taxes — were in some sense a continuation of Bush I’s. The same is broadly true in foreign policy (both were committed multilateralists).
I tend to agree Glenn and others when they say that Republicans were just as crazy about attacking Clinton as they are about attacking Obama and that the teabaggers are just John Birch 2, Electric Boogaloo. And it’s also possible that, as Krugman asserts, Reagan would have gone just as nuts as Bush did if Republicans had controlled both houses of Congress during his presidency (though I’m not sure I believe this).
But in terms of actually implementing poor policy, wrecking finances of average Americans, racking up trillions dollars of debt during an expansion, and decimating our military and international prestige, Bush II was something new under the sun.
demkat620
Well, Reagan actually had to govern CA. And he did know things. Not many, but he did. There was something a little more…charitable in Reagan.
Bush was just a dick.
The Grand Panjandrum
And his final paragraph is devastating. EVERY Republican running for office should be required to face the music–AGAIN.
They must answer simple questions about basic GOP ideology with respect to the economy. That ideology has demonstrably failed. What would they do differently to avoid the obvious failures of the past?
It really is that simple. What would they do differently?
Cat Lady
I really truly believe that this was all a feature and not a bug. Every single thing Bush touched turned to shit if you were not in the Bush Cheney inner circle, and unless you believe that Bush actually tried to do something helpful for those not of his inner circle, which I don’t, this is the only conclusion that can be drawn.
General Winfield Stuck
Yes, Bush was a mega disaster away and apart from any recent president. But just measuring median income changes don’t tell the real story of republican stewardship of American economic matters. To get that, you need to look at the rich/poor gap of wealth distribution and that it ALWAYS widens in favor of the wealthy under every center right presnit. It is their numero uno initiative from day one, though they sure don;’t say so.
demkat620
Nothing. Tax cuts can’t fail. They can only be failed.
dmsilev
This just proves that Bush wasn’t a True Conservative, because if the President were a True Conservative, it would be unpossible for any other result than endless prosperity.
-dms
EconWatcher
Say what you will about Reagan, he would not have made the mistakes W did. Remember Beirut? 250 marines were blown up, Reagan realized it was a fool’s errand, and he pulled out. He talked tough on foreign policy, but he was pragmatic. He never would have pulled an idiotic stunt like the invasion of Iraq.
And, while this might not be a popular sentiment on this site, I believe the top marginal tax rate was 70% when Reagan took office. I’ve got no truck with today’s teabaggers, but you kinda gotta admit, that might have been a little excessive, and Reagan might have had a point about that.
General Winfield Stuck
@EconWatcher:
Most here have said before, that while no Reagan fan, he was far and away more preferable than Danger Monkey.
TenguPhule
A Government Coup, for starters. (I wish I was only kidding)
TenguPhule
It was merely a matter of the size of the fuckups, not the thinking behind the fuckups themselves.
W, the fuckup Reagan dreamed of being.
TenguPhule
Coicidentally a whole lot of rich people got richer and everyone else started getting shafted on the economic opportunity scale right after the top rates went down.
Hmmm……
Irony Abounds
Republicans controlled the Senate for the first six years of Reagan’s presidency, and to a large extent controlled the House because there were many more southern conservative Dems back then. Reagan sucked, but was miles ahead of Bush the Younger.
Zifnab25
What did lowering the highest marginal tax rate accomplish? We can argue about fairness and equity and getting what you pay for. But when Reagen punched a giant hole in the budget by slashing taxes, how did the country benefit?
We spiked the debt under Reagen by hundreds of billions of dollars. Growth wasn’t any better than under Nixon or LBJ. We weren’t spared the Savings & Loan crash of ’87.
How exactly did we benefit from this decision?
Napoleon
I absolutely believe that if Reagan had a Republican Congress like Bush did you would have seen him acting just like and pushing policies like Jr. No doubt in my mind.
EconWatcher
TenguPhule,
Something about crossing that 50% threshold for marginal tax rates just seems like theft to me, even for the rich.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want more protection for poor and working people.
Augustine
More like “Breakin’ Bad 2: The Electoral Boogey-Boogey-Boo”
General Winfield Stuck
@EconWatcher:
It was too high and was fueling stagflation. It was a simple fix that spurred growth, though RR had to raise taxes a bit to shrink the deficit. Can you imagine Bush doing that?
gnomedad
@EconWatcher:
I agree, and the fact that we somehow managed to survive that makes the soshulism bullshit all the more surreal. But since Obama will likely keep his hands off his staff, I suppose that all they’ve got.
jwb
@The Grand Panjandrum: “What would they do differently?”
Clearly, they would just answer that the tax cuts weren’t sufficiently large, or they were overly progressive, or there was too much regulation and red tape for the tax cuts to work properly or they didn’t cut spending sufficiently for the tax cuts to work. But you haven’t heard any of the goopers backing off the tax cut line, so I just don’t think they see it as a liability—and quite frankly, at this point, I don’t think the voters do either. And that’s really one of the biggest problems the nation’s politics faces.
Actually, what’s happening in California should put the tax cut question to a great test over the next election cycle.
Robertdsc-iphone
Now if only Obama would pin the GOP to the godsdamned floor with this kind of data. But that would impede on his bipartisanship fetish & we can’t have that.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Cat Lady:
It’s called Starve the Beast.
Deschanel
Yet when has any mainstream media commentator even mentioned W Bush? Bush’s 8 years in power seem to have been totally disappeared from memory. Everything is Obama’s fault, and W’s disastrous, ruinous policies don’t figure in the least. The MSM never asked the costs- or asked anything, actually- when Bush was Prez, but now everything Obama does is raked over the coals and the open mike given to his most unhinged detractors. Suddenly everyone cares about the deficit, extravagantly. People who clearly can’t afford to see a dentist spittling about economic theory and the national debt. A remarkable reversal.
gnomedad
@Robertdsc-iphone:
I have no doubt that Obama would like to use this data more often, but the sad fact is that anything brought up too often can become old news (unless you are a teabagger). Right now all the attention is on health care, and sometimes you have to save your best stuff until you are right over the thermal exhaust port.
mai naem
@EconWatcher
I don’t have a problem with a 50 percent marginal tax rate for high income folks. The problem is that in reality it would not be 50 percent or even 35 percent. With the various tax deductions it’s quite a bit lower whereas your lower middle class/middle class person just is not going to have those kind of deductions. And that’s not even counting the cheating. It’s a whole lot easier to cheat when you’re making more and have your own business.
Will
In other news, how did I miss Sully’s pot bust?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hc2Skxali1PLeLD7yFI6RLzI8mnAD9ALFGD81
stinkwrinkle
@EconWatcher: They don’t (and didn’t) pay that much. That was just the rate on straight earnings, there’s all kinds of ways around it. What’s the top rate now, like 35%? Warren Buffet admits he pays about 16%, what with all the loopholes and such.
Sloth
Yes, and it’s also called a free lunch. The notion that you can spend, spend, spend (on things like the military, medicare part D, etc) and *cut* taxes and that revenue will magically increase. It’s a free lunch. There ain’t no such thing.
The other free lunch is libertarianism. We will eliminate government and taxes and trust the market and everything will be happiness and light.
If only.
Sloth
Obama should not say anything yet. What he should do is come out with a budget that is lower – and more balanced – than Bush.
Proof is in the pudding.
Polish the Guillotines
It’s not just incomes that got pulvarized during W’s reign of error. Check out this NY Times article about how the Clean Water act was summarily ignored for the past eight years. I’m so pissed off right now.
I swear, if I were in D.C., I’d go straight-up Buzz Aldrin on some fucking teabaggers. They are too fucking stupid to ever have any power ever again. Fuck them all.
Cat Lady
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
I watched the Davie Scatino episode of the Sopranos last night. Bush II started the identical bustout on day 1 of his 1st term. 9/11 provided the perfect scrim in front of the real action.
Roger Moore
@The Grand Panjandrum:
I believe the answer is:
1) 9/11
2) Just look at the GDP, that’s what’s really important
3) 9/11
4) It’s really Clinton’s fault somehow
5) 9/11
6) But we kept you safe from teh Terrurists!
7) 9/11
scarshapedstar
@Roger Moore:
8) Michael Moore is fat.
Ash Can
@Will: Someone in a thread yesterday (whose handle escapes me; apologies)mentioned he’d been busted while on vacation for “blazin’ a blunt.” What does it say about me that I immediately thought it was an indecent exposure rap?
Polish the Guillotines
@Ash Can: Hahahaha!
CalD
I was just reading that same article. I loved the assertion in the comments section by alert reader “handlethetruth,” that median income is a BS metric because it doesn’t include benefit compensation such as employer-paid health insurance. I’m actually not sure if that’s true but even if it were, the fact that the cost of health insurance has skyrocketed in recent years (with accompanying increases in co-pays and deductables, while actual coverage decreased) seems like pretty weak consolation for the fact that paychecks have not. You really have to love partisan logic.
Handle goes on to accuse Brownstein of “cherry-picking” for not having compared median income for 2006 to 1998 — I’ll go out on a limb guess he or she erroneously believed 1998 to have been a bad year for Clinton, because median income growth for 2006 (0.7%) doesn’t actually compare favorably to 1998 (3.5%) in that respect. (Clinton’s worst year looks to have been 2000, when median income essentially remained flat and Bush’s best was actually 2007, not 2006.)
Here’s a link to the actual report, BTW:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf
Political Pragmatist
Friday, I blogged “The Party of Failure”
http://politicalpragmatist.com/?p=556
I do not understand why the MSM does not ever ask Republicans this most basic question…What do you think were Conservative successes over the past thirty years?
There are none aside from the arguable “Reagan defeated Communism.” None. The conservative ideology is a complete bust, yet they are never held accountable and are constantly chanting “give us a chance to get back to Reagan basics.” Reaganomics was a total disaster when it was put into full effect under Bush.
The only thing they were really successful at they don’t want to brag about. They totally hosed the middle class. It was the biggest heist in history. Madoff was a pickpocket in comparison.
Hard to believe anyone gives them any attention at all. If they come back, for what? To finish the job?
Chad N Freude
@Ash Can: Your naiveté is charming.
Seanly
A lot of good comments…
I’ll just add that this economic woes was a feature of the program, not a bug.
JGabriel
@EconWatcher:
The top marginal rate was 70%, but the top marginal rate on earned income was 50% on income over 216K/yr (roughly equivalent to 500k in today’s terms, I think). I’m not sure what kind of income the 70% applies to, but it wasn’t earned income.
.
Chad N Freude
I stumbled across this 2008 (pre-election) book, Unequal Democracy, today. The reader reviews on the Amazon webpage range from “Insightful” to “Nonsense”. Almost as interesting a discussion as on this blog. And a thoughtful review by Dan Balz from WaPo. It appears to fit neatIy into this discussion. I checked it out of my local library and may actually
readskim it.Sloth
@Chad N Freude:
Galbraith’s The Predator State is also worth a read.
http://bit.ly/2ZN4XH
David Finley
I would say that’s a big stretch, to claim Clinton’s economic policies were a continuation of GHW Bush’s.
As I recall, the only thing Bush I ever talked about on the domestic front was cutting capital gains taxes to advance the interests of the plutocracy.
bob h
If Hillary had won the nomination and the Presidency the loonies would be in full cry, also, probably just as bad. But the battle against them would have been joined with gusto.
liberal
@JGabriel:
Very important point.
In addition, the definition of taxable income, and how it’s is computed, is key.
Simply citing the top marginal rate is uninformed.
tc125231
@General Winfield Stuck: Correct. Well said.
mclaren
Taiwan just jailed their ex-leader for LIFE for corruption.
I’m not asking much. I’m just asking that America rise to the political stature of Taiwan.
But that’s too much to ask, apparently. The Taiwanese political system is too far above America’s to allow us to aspire to that level of legitimacy as a nation.
MH
The damndest thing of all is that Bush probably wouldn’t even acknowledge this as true, in a bizarre inversion of the McGovern quote: “How could this be true? Everyone I know got richer than ever!”