Is George W. Bush the worst US president ever?

limerickman

Effectively what you will have is increased direct/indirect personal taxation.
In specific terms, the actual tax rate may only increase marginally but what about the indirect tax such as fuel, medical cover costs etc ?
Cost have to be recouped somewhere.

The mounting costs of Iraq and the reparations damages also need to be factored in to the US taxpayers budget.

GERARDO

Yes He Is The Worst, Shame On Him And His Family. They Are The Dregs Of This World......

darkboong

Does your wife know you are looking at pubic wigs ?

davidmc

If the "dupe's" errr...I mean "Bush supporter's" don't get it this time around, thier children most certainly will, what w/ thier corporate master's exporting job's to the lowest bidder & Bush presiding over the largest deficit's of any president in american history. This "situation" will affect, as you indicated, higher mortgage rates, interest rates, lower gdp & we all know it effect's the value of the dollar as it is now worthless oversea's. Only a completely depraved, imbicilic, moron would buy dollar's unless of course they wanted to lord those worthless notes over our heads in the future for political gain (China ). Woe be unto those who mortgaged our country for thier own personal gain (Rousseau had something to say about that)

__________________
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
George Carlin
US comedian and actor (1937 - )

Wurm

That won't matter, because it's all about grabbing as much as you can before you croak. To hell with what their kids will have to live with, (crushing debt, low wages, environmental disaster) because those "middle class" morons will all be 6 ft. under.

__________________
"Bush is the first President to admit to an impeachable offense."

- John Dean, former Counsel to the President (Nixon)

The aim of big corporations is to separate fools from their money all of the time and ordinary folks from their money most of the time. The rest of us must fend for ourselves.

davidmc

That's right. I had forgotten the Republican credo of: "Mine, mine, & mine "

__________________
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
George Carlin
US comedian and actor (1937 - )

Billy Fish

Exactly what those programs are the writer doesn't say. Seems to me there are a lot more programs supporting the 'non-working' people of America than for those of us who actually work and pay taxes.




Really? Housing development up in record numbers, unemployment around 5%, GDP growth of 3.4% this year...You know, this same kind of argument was being tossed around 25 years ago when Reagan was president and here we are, decades later still waiting for the economic sky to fall.


Unparalled? Really? You mean the Patriot Act is worse than when Lincon suspended habeous corpus? Quite a few people were locked up without charge or trial and even though the Supreme Court told Lincoln he could nto do it, his response was something along the lines of 'Well I have the backing of an army that says I can.' Or how about when FDR interned over 100,000 Japanese Americans, confiscated thier property and voided all thier rights? Is the Patriot Act worse than those or is the writer maybe on a different parallel universe?


Factually false. Still need to get the court to authorize it.


I'd love to pick this article apart but I just don't have the time or energy. Suffice it to say Bush is certainly not one of the best but he surely isn't the worst. Perhaps if the writer took off the ideological blinders and maybe took a few history lessons, he/she would realize that.

__________________
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Benjamin Franklin

darkboong

The Economic landscape 25 years ago was significantly different to the ones that exist in the world today. The US debt is outrageously high and the trade deficit growth is accelerating because the US is increasingly dependant on imported goods. *IF* the wheels fall off the US economy the recovery could be particularly difficult because the majority of the income *appears* to come from trivially outsourced white collar jobs. When the going gets tough, the successful move somewhere easier to do business.

The surge in the property market in the US appears to be built on the premise of cheap lending, which simply can not continue with the accelerating trade deficit, national debt and stagnating/shrinking income. Somewhat reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, but on a far larger scale.

The GDP figure doesn't really tell you much aside from some folks are getting stinking rich at the top of the pile.

Billy Fish

I agree that the US debt is high, however, the doom and gloom the article writer was moaning about is the same thing I heard in 1985. That is the point I was making.


Interest rates have been quite low for several years and show no signs of increasing in any significant way. Stagnating/shrinking income? Funny, the Bureau of Economic Analysis indicates that for 2004, personal income grew by 4.4%, double that of 2003. Obviously 2005 figures are not available yet


Um...I would have to respectfully disagree. The fact that our GDP is growing is a postive indicator of increased productivity and jobs. See we have a postive growth GDP of around 3.4% with unemployment sitting at 5%. On the other hand for example, Germany is forecasting a 1.6% growth in GDP for 2006 and is sitting at 11% unemployment. Whether people at the top of the pile are getting 'stinking rich' is really irrelevant considering productivity and employment are increasing.

__________________
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Benjamin Franklin

darkboong

Fair enough, however it's not the fact that it's high, it's the fact that it is high and the rate at which it grows is accelerating *fast*.




... Meanwhile the USD actually *dropped* in value dramatically w.r.t to the Euro for example ... The Euro was aimed to be roughly 1:1 with the USD, and traded at about .9 for a long time, currently trading at 1.21. Lots of folks bitched about the Chinese pegging their currency to the USD, but *IF* they floated it properly the USD would suffer another dramatic fall. Great you say, more export, but what exactly does the US export these days ? Wheat ? Military hardware ? Neither of those two items strike me as a winner in the modern world. Technology - err, kinda, but that's moving offshore fast, HP for example pretty much rebadge grey boxes. Even Intel is shifting it's design work abroad, a large chunk of it's manufacturing is already offshore, notwithstanding it's investment in the Austin fab.



Single digit increases in GDP when the currency has taken a double digit hit doesn't strike me as a one step forward, two steps back.



OTOH the standard of living in Germany is significantly better. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Paul Craig Roberts (who served with Ronnie) is very pessimistic about the employment situation. What he is seeing is the high-revenue earning jobs moving offshore and being replaced with serving tables and flipping burgers. Another commentator pointed out that a full 20% of the white collar jobs are involved with finance, an industry that is sitting on a huge personal debt mountain in the US, as earning power falls. A rising property market that is floated on a rapidly growing mountain of bad debt in that situation is a very very bad thing.



It is important. It means that the average joe will get shafted. How many rich folks are going to invest their money (that is shrinking in real-world value) into a nationwide ghetto ? Rich folks have significantly more fiscal mobility, the money will walk (and has been as evidenced by the bonds trading over the last couple of years for example).

... I haven't even started on the Oil & Peak Oil stuff yet. All the western economies are heavily dependant on Oil, the price has risen *very* sharply during Bush's tenure. If anything I expect the price to continue to rise in line with the rising global political instability that the Bush foreign policy has promoted. My feeling is that the Bush doctrine is simply to maintain the US financial bubble by controlling the world's oil market. That ain't actually happening on the ground, and in practice I believe that in combination with the domestic Energy polcies it is making the US even more vulnerable.

How about if Israel actually decides to use it's "matches" on an oil field or two ? Maybe some revolutionary/terrorist works out how to throughly destroy an oil field ? Or perhaps Saudi trashes it's Ghawar field beyond redemption by overproduction ?

If anything the West as a whole should be working on dramatically reducing it's dependancy on oil and thereby reducing the risk exposure. The US has more to lose than many in this scenario, it's domestic and foreign policy centres on projecting military force to dominate oil, and in turn it needs a hell of a lot of oil to project that military force.

As an engineer I see a mutual dependancy that is leading the US towards a dead end. FWIW, the situation is little better in Europe perhaps even worse.

darkboong

Some more stuff... http://www.projectcensored.org/news...t_Proj_Cens.pdf

Note the focus of that report is largely on Oil as an energy source. Consider the fact that transportation accounts for a very large proportion of the oil consumption. Oil price rises and shortages will dramatically alter the way we live.

Where are you going to get your Televisions from when it becomes too expensive to ship them from China ? Countries will have to become more self-sufficient in their manufacturing than they are at present. Globalisation is railroading us into a situation where we simply can not survive without cheap transport - and that will come to an end in the forseeable future unless something very dramatic happens.

Few policymakers are even talking about that issue, but the *real* gotcha (IMO) will be the impact on manufacturing. Our entire manufacturing infrastructure is heavily dependant on oil. Just about every kind of material you care to mention requires oil directly and indirectly in it's production. Wood is the only major exception that comes to mind, and as fantastic and versatile as Wood is, it can't replace the vast majority of materials we take for granted today.

Wurm

pillock

n : a person who is not very bright; "The economy, stupid!"



LOL! You Brits are killin' me!

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__________________
"Bush is the first President to admit to an impeachable offense."

- John Dean, former Counsel to the President (Nixon)

The aim of big corporations is to separate fools from their money all of the time and ordinary folks from their money most of the time. The rest of us must fend for ourselves.