Democracy Has Prevailed.

January 25, 2007

More Follow-up on the State of the Union Speech

From the Washington Post:
In his State of the Union address last night, President Bush presented an arguably misleading and often flawed description of "the enemy" that the United States faces overseas, lumping together disparate groups with opposing ideologies to suggest that they have a single-minded focus in attacking the United States.
But the good stuff is found later on in the article. Take a look:
On domestic policy, Bush at one point said that "the recovery" has added more than 7.2 million jobs since August 2003. But the net number of jobs created since Bush became president in January 2001, is much lower -- just 3.6 million. The Bush administration's performance is fairly mediocre for the sixth year of a presidency, according to historical statistics maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 18 million jobs were added by the sixth year of Bill Clinton's presidency -- and nearly 10 million were added at this point in Ronald Reagan's presidency.
And the point that the fiscal conservative crowd should be screaming about:
Bush claimed credit for cutting the budget deficit ahead of schedule and proposed to eliminate it over the next five years. He did not mention that he inherited a huge budget surplus -- $236 billion in 2000 -- compared with a $296 billion deficit in the 2006 fiscal year, largely as a result of Bush's tax cuts and spending increases.
So he inherits a $236 billion surplus, slashes it to ribbons (via "tax cuts and spending increases") and finds himself 6 years later with a $296 billion defict...and this is a good thing?

Can you tell I ain't a big fan?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And of course the deficit doesn't include the money he is pissing into a hole in Iraq.