Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bush's Legacy....I'd Vote For Him A 3rd Time, If I Could!!

Who cares? The people who'd have said that are the ones who'd have (and do) excoriated him for something else anyway. The Mexicans ain't going to vote Republican. I don't get why the hot Reps can't understand this. The way it is, he alienated a significant portion of the Republican base. Throw away the loyalists for a shot at some clowns who will only support you in fair weather, if then? I've never thought he was stupid, despite his catchy nickname, but this certainly doesn't speak well of his intelligence or common sense.

In my humble backwoods opinion, our economic might is the single most important factor in keeping America the strongest country in the world, so to ignore it or trying to compete with the libs on spending is completely reckless and only serves to weaken us in the future when not so friendly countries like China are experiencing double digit GDP growth and in turn exponentially increasing their military spending.

How long before Chindia starts using their economic might to dictate world policy while we're stuck with such enormous debt, we have little capability to forge world policy?

There definately needs to be a better balance between fiscal responsibility and strong national defense. You can't go full tilt in either direction without suffering some ramifications.

The only reason Bush is President is because he sucks less than Kerry or Gore.That does not make him a great President in my eyes.Same as McCain sucks less.Hell of a reason to vote for anyone.Hang em all and start over.

I just don't think so Ethan, by any measure of effectiveness. In terms of purchasing power, unemployment, home ownership etc., we've had an unprecedented boom during the Bush years and the tax cuts in my view was the prime mover of this stimulus.

Besides a President, aside from "PRESENTING" a budget to Congress and proposing policies (like tax cuts that WORKED), he has little control over the budget. That's the Congress' purview. I thnk he was dead wrong on the Medicare entitlement, but he did try to reform SS and was shut down by Congress.

Also, the oil issue is particularly specific. The President tried and more than once, to pass an effective energy policy that included expanding domestic oil drilling( 84% of our Continental Shelf and Anwar have more oil & gas reserves than Iraq), nuclear, coal and eventual alternative energy. IT was Congress, but democraps and republicans that dicked this up. Oil companies have ZERO influence on world oil prices. They are the most closely scrutinized industry with the possible exception of nuclear. Their profit MARGIN (different form profit) remains between eight & nince cents on the dollar. Pretty slim by any standards. Like I said, everything else you said is opne to discuss, but the above two are just not so. jorge

He was President during that too.

Unemployment figures don't reflect those who have run out of benefits. Interest rates are lower for banks. They absolutely are not lower for the average American than they were four years ago. Folks who work at Wal Mart are only investors in the stock market due to the free shares their employer provides. The guy at Whattaburger and the chick who does your wife's hair usually ain't got a lot of shares in Conoco-Phillips.

There is no economic boom around here unless you count the sound of the local tool company literally going south.

The things Bush proposed as an energy policy could very well be seen as being self-interest.

Jorge, you are confusing people with facts, they would rather argue with unfounded emotion as their reference material..

If we let Bush have a third term, we would see a greater loss of confidence in the republican party, more factions of the GOP, and more government. Its time for a change!

Very much so.

Banks are crashing,.. the dollar is tumbling,..., home foreclosures have reached an unprecedented level,.. gas is $4 a gallon, and the Bushites are raving about how good the economy is.

You cain't make this stuff up.

yeah, all that drilling in the ANWR, off Florida and California, would really benefit.....the American people....and he's one, so yeah, I guess it is self-interest

Bush didn't take office until January of 2001. So he caused the crash of 2000 while he was governor of Texas?

He has an approval rating of 28%

I'm like Jay Leno- " Who the heck are those people?"

The crash of 2000


By Christopher Farrell
Updated: 4:25 p.m. CT Feb 13, 2004
No one should be surprised when economic or budget forecasts coming out of Washington are influenced by politics, especially during an election year. But when economic history is rewritten -- with political consequences -- that's going too far.

President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, chaired by Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, is trying to get away with exactly such revisionist history. The CEA's Economic Report of the President, released Feb. 9, unilaterally changed the start date of the last recession to benefit Bush's re-election bid.

Instead of using the accepted start date of March 2001, the CEA announced that the recession really started in the fourth quarter of 2000 � a shift that would make it much more credible for the Bush administration to term it the "Clinton Recession." In a subsequent press conference, Mankiw said that the CEA had looked at the available data and "made the call."

This simple statement masks an attack on one of the few remaining bastions of economic neutrality. For almost 75 years, the start and end dates of recessions have been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private non-partisan research group based in Cambridge, Mass.

While there have been complaints over the years, this arrangement has been accepted by ., government agencies, and politicians � until now.

"For the first time, the federal government is intervening in the process," says Robert Hall, an economist at the conservative Hoover Institution who since 1978 has chaired the NBER panel of seven prominent economists who make the actual decision.

The NBER's decisions have been dragged into the political arena before, but without impact.

Mankiw's tin ear
In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the NBER to combine the 1980 and 1981-82 recessions into a single downturn that could be called the "Carter Recession." During the '92 election season, the first Bush administration kept hoping that the NBER would announce that the recession of 1990-91 was over � a statement that didn't come until December 1992.

To be fair, even if the latest recession did begin after Bush took office in January 2001, no one can say he caused it. And Mankiw is also under attack from Republicans for what they consider his overly tin ear on other subjects, most notably his statement that the outsourcing phenomenon is "a plus for the economy in the long run."




Still, his decision to fiddle with economic convention can't be seen as anything less than manipulation in an election year.

In his press conference, Mankiw justified his decision by saying, correctly, that the NBER panel was already considering moving the recession start date forward. Some key data that the NBER watch � including industrial production and inflation-adjusted business sales � peaked in mid-2000. On the other hand, the latest revisions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shifted the peak of non-farm employment slightly later, from February to March 2001. That's important, because the recessions of 1981-82 and 1990-91 both started in or after the month that employment fell.

But rather than waiting for the NBER's decision, Bush's CEA jumped the gun. And it made the biggest change possible, despite considerable debate within the NBER panel. The revised date is "very much up in the air," says Hall.

Adds Jeffrey Frankel, a member of the NBER panel, an economist at, and a former member of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers: "The way I read the data, there isn't a strong case for moving the date up by more than one month." That puts the start date at February, 2001, after Bush took office. The lack of a clear picture has led the NBER to hold off making a final decision pending more accurate data.
There's "no sense of time pressure," says Hall. "We want to do this right."

Economists who go to Washington always struggle to maintain their objectivity against the political demands of the administration they work for. Based on its latest performance, the CEA seems to have lost the battle.

And your Dem Congress' approval rating is less than half that.

You figure it out!!

+1

Sorry, I was thinking about the crash after 9-11.

And you can't write comedy that good either.

The Dem congress approval is higher that the Republicans Congress was. If you have a point now would be a great time to make it.

BTW I'm not a Democrat but Bush is the worst President in my lifetime and I won't defend him.

Piper

The Dem congress approval is higher that the Republicans Congress was
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Of course, you're wrong about that but I'm not doing the research for you.