If United States President George W Bush were running for re-election on the basis of his stewardship of the US economy alone, he would already be packing his bags. To be blunt, by recent standards, the economy’s performance has been dismal. Some of that grimness has not been Bush’s fault — he took office in the backwash of a calamitous financial bubble, the effects of which made the economic impact of 9/11 look like a hiccup. But little that the Bush team has done since has been effective or sensible in policy terms.
The debate inside the White House appears to have been limited in the extreme, provoking Bush’s original choice as treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, to describe the president as being ”like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people”.
The administration’s measures have been less ”it’s the economy, stupid”, and more ”the stupid economy”.
Even if we excuse Bush from the aftershocks of the dotcom meltdown and the disruption of 9/11, his record remains poor. His default mode of economic stimulus has been tax cuts for the wealthy, which Republican apologists shrilly declared to be engines of job creation.
That has proved to be incorrect. In February the White House was predicting job growth of more than 300 000 a month. The reality has been less than half that — 1,7-million fewer jobs than the administration forecast seven months ago. That means the labour market is standing still, with job creation barely keeping pace with US population growth. Without job growth, the legacy of the Bush tax cuts has, instead, been a ballooning deficit. The projections are staggering.
The Congressional Budget Office forecasts a $2 000-billion deficit between now and 2009, including a $400-billion shortfall this year. Given that Bush came into office with a budget surplus, the figures are extraordinary: the US economy has been mortgaged for its wealthiest citizens.
Bush addressed little of this during the Republican convention, instead mentioning vague and nebulous plans to encourage ”ownership”. As the Los Angeles Times observed, his speech ”would have been more convincing if he had not actually been president for the past four years”.
John Kerry has not been much more forthcoming, but he is at least concerned about the dangers of the deficit. Many of Kerry’s economic advisers cut their teeth in Bill Clinton’s administration, and offer the prospect of competence and wisdom — something sorely missed in Bush’s White House. — Â