Headache in a Suitcase said:
Now you are mistaken... a recession doesn't become a recession overnight... the economic downturn (better wording for ya?) started towards the end of the Clinton years, just like the economic downturn of the early 90s started in the tail end of the reagan years
To be fair on both regards, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton started a long line of deregulation to the point that government has little to do with starting recessions. In fact, the dot-com economy of the 1990s was (and still is) an economy with a false bottom with nothing inside, and, ultimately, showed that "economic prosperity" was really nothing more than investor confidence.
The demise of the windfall profits tax (a heavy tax on excessive corporate profits that was designed to force companies to either reinvest heavily into themselves or to pay their workers a lot to avoid paying the tax) in the 1980s has certainly inflated corporate profits, but ruined the last incentive that business ever had for self-investment or to raise wages. Now it is more profitable to risk bankruptcy, as the lack of self-investment incentive has made companies very apt to be ruined in stock panics.
Now what a government does *during* a recession makes the difference, and, frankly, I don't think Bush has the support. Sure, you will have your die-hard Republicans, and 42% statistically are (just like 42% are statistically Democrats). But looking between the lines, I don't think that most people really are satisfied with his economic performance at all. The usually belligerent Yahoo! forums were nearly unanimous in disgust with comments from Greenspan that the solution was to "reeducate" everyone whose job was shipped abroad. But, when it is jobs that, only a year or two ago, did require higher education (like Information Technology and Computer Science jobs), then what is everyone who is not a billionaire like Bill Gates or has a rich and powerful daddy supposed to do?
And that's where Bush's leadership is lacking. His only response are tax cuts that are directed to the wealthy--and ask the investment world, they're direct enough to tell you that the mega wealthy have done very well during the Bush years, while the rest of us are wondering where the next job is going to come from. I was visionary enough to predict this while getting my college education; basically, any job that isn't creativity-dependent will, inevitably, be shipped abroad, where Americans will never be able to compete with nations that have abominable living standards and low wages.
Melon