Letters to the Editor
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Too Complex
It is possible the writers and handlers thought these issues were too complex for Bush to discuss without mangling them to the point where he'd have to get defensive. Bush doesn't do well with ideas that take more than a sentence or two to convey, he has a tendency to drift. Before you know it he'd be talking about how he "supports houses 'cause people need to live places" and the like.
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Still Content, Having Turned The Economy Upside-Down.
I think that's the likely reason the president is so glib at these affairs.
You mention in the article that unemployment is still low. I have to disagree with that one statement. As far as I know, there is no measure of how many jobs individuals are working, hence the "low" figure we keep seeing.
I have come to know countless others who are doing the same as I am: treading water, working two (or more) jobs. At my "fun job" we see it all in the credit reporting that takes place. Horror stories with credit card debt across all demographic lines. I've seen $180K income with the same or similar dollar figure in credit card debt.
And as for the non-government jobs in the monthly report, is there way to see through the mush and take a look at how many of these are actually jobs replacing government workers?
What about those thousands of jobs gone to private security firms who replaced actual soldiers to guard U.S. military bases? Are those non-government jobs?
This president may be a moron, but he's sure found great ways to keep us hornswoggled by the "official" numbers.
One of those frauds, however, is now clear: the Bush "Ownership Society" is a scam.
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does little Bush even know about........
overdrawing his checking account?
or, late fees on his credit cards?
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Thought Experiment
... you could imagine he didn't even know there was a housing bust or a credit crunch. I'm almost prepared to believe that of him ...
Heh. "Almost?"
Here's a useful experiment. Suppose it wasn't your country. Suppose it wasn't your people involved and your leaders that you either voted for or failed to successfully vote against -- say if it was Turkmenistan and you were reading about the late great "Padishah Emperor" Niyazov and his increasingly weird and out-of-touch pronouncements.
Supposing all that, would you have any reasonable doubt that the man was delusional? Or that he had deliberately (if not consciously) surrounded himself with people who would protect him from reality?
You wouldn't. So why give Bush a break?
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and then there's China
I would have missed this article if not for an eagle eyed friend.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/08/07/bcnchina107a.xml
Maybe it's all bluster, but it sure does seem like a serious issue. The article talks about how China is considering the "nuclear option" of liquidating its holdings of US treasuries if the US through trade sanctions attempts to force a reevaluation of the yuan.
Of course, if we're talking about currency valuation we could bring up the idea of the US petrodollar or Iran's desire to untie the value of oil from it. I'd argue that much of our meddling in the Middle East is about the value of American currency.
One could make a convincing argument that our real objective in eying Iran, as the Bush administration is, is not preventing the accumulation of nuclear weapons - something that is years away - but to prevent destabilization of the dollar through the introduction of an Iranian oil market. Iran asked the Japanese to pay for their oil in Yen as recent as in the past two weeks.
I'd argue that economically the US has to find out how to have a viable economy without buoying it with revenue from oil sales due to selling oil in US dollars.
The petrodollar issue is serious. The mortgage mess and unregulated hedge funds are serious issues. Now China threatens to cash in their chips.
Oh, and if you haven't seen Jim Cramer lose it talking about the market... this should almost be its own story. It's amazing. Consider how hopped up he usually and then imagine him losing his cool, completely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWksEJQEYVU
It makes for good TV but doesn't make me feel any better about where the market is or is headed.
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Bush is, and always has been, a moron
He's quite possibly the out out of touch president since Herbert Hoover denied there was a depression.
"Padishah Emperor"--nice touch. Of course, that's closer than you think--Bush, too, is in the control of megacorporations (the Spacing Guild?) and all his prepared remarks reflect just what they want us to hear.
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A real let them eat cake moment
For George and his ilk things are pretty damn good. That's his perspective. That is not so good for people like you is to George, just your bad luck at having picked middle class parents. The work ethic of the idle rich has always been the same since the days of the robber barons.
Name me one thing the Bush administration has done vis a vis economic policy. One thing. See? His economic advisors are there to use their expertise to give him sweet sounding words on how to ignore your fate. Things are pretty good for old George. Don't know what your problem is.
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unemployment isn't low
The "unemployment rate" is low. And there are two ways to keep it low. Either add jobs or remove people who aren't working from the "potential workers" category. Guess which one is occurring.
Further, with the continued push by employers to reclassify workers as independent contractors or to have 5 part time workers covering the hours 3 full time workers, there is a strong disconnect from what the unemployment rate means to the health of the economy.
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Bush-league country
It's pretty apparant that Bush's "plan" is to turn over the reins to a broken down country to his successor, who he assumes will be a Democrat.
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We've Been Sold Down The River
Re: "...keeping taxes low is the best medicine for a strong America" & "...the U.S. economy is far from crisis status"
It is amazing to me that even those who are anti-Bush swallow whole the idea that the economy is doing just fine. Aside from the highly manipulated unemployment stats, wages are stagnant for the vast majority of Americans, personal debt is at an all-time high (and the Congress and Bush made sure the people couldn't take advantage of bankruptcy laws to escape crushing credit card debt), the savings rate is negative and now the one item that most Americans thought they had in terms of a personal asset -- their home -- is turning out to be their biggest liability.
This is, of course, all by design. The wealthy ruling class, while blowing smoke about the "great economy" (for them) is effectively eliminating the middle class. The end result will be a society of wealthy elite ruling over an impoverished and economically enslaved working class, kept under constant surveillance under the guise of "fighting terrorism".
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Excerpt from The Invisible Hand (of the U.S. Government) in Financial Markets by Robert Bell
The U.S. Treasury holdings of Japan and China are essentially a consequence of a trade imbalance between the U.S. and these two countries, with the balance heavily tilted to the latter. To maintain the imbalance, which they both clearly want to do, both countries must keep their currency pegged against the dollar at a lower rate than it might otherwise be...To keep the items relatively cheap, the central banks of those countries keep their currencies cheap by buying a corresponding amount of dollars, thus supporting the dollar against their currencies. The dollar may essentially collapse against the euro, but not against the yen and the yuan. With the dollars the Japanese and Chinese central banks have bought, they can buy something denominated in U.S. dollars; the item of choice is U.S. Treasuries since it is like holding dollars that pay interest. So this has the effect of pumping the price of Treasuries too. Because the items made in China and Japan are cheaper than those of corresponding quality made in the U.S. (in the case of many Japanese items, there may not be U.S. items of similar quality), the effect is to create manufacturing jobs in those countries while simultaneously losing them in the U.S. In effect the jobs are exported and foreign currency is imported to buy dollars and then Treasuries. This has an advantage for the Bush administration, which has the ruinously ridiculous policies of simultaneously cutting taxes and waging wars or building up for them. In effect, the basic racket is: the Bush administration exports jobs to these countries, and in turn they finance Bush’s fiscal deficit so he can continue his wars and cut taxes for his friends. For the Chinese, the basic racket is too delicious and too ironical. They industrialize their country at the expense of the de-industrialization of the U.S. Not only is it sweet revenge for more than a hundred years of humiliation at the hands of Europeans and Americans, but also at the end they are relatively strong and the U.S. is relatively not. What do they care if the deal isn’t quite as good as it would be in a perfect world and they lose a third, half, two-thirds of their savings in U.S. Treasuries? Besides, in an even mildly less imperfect world, the U.S. President would not make such a blatantly corrupt bargain against the people of the U.S. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett calls this system of indebting U.S. citizens to foreign governments “a sharecropper’s society,” to distinguish it from Bush’s supposed “ownership society.”
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/reality/2005/0403.html