A reader quotes me:
This is what I mean by complete fantasies. Bush inherited a recession from Clinton? He inherited a boom and a surplus. He turned them into the worst recession since the 1930s and a crippling debt that made it very hard to recover.
The "Clinton Boom" was essentially over before Bush took office. The last two quarters of 2000 pretty much showed that the times of 3+% GDP quarterly growth were over (after a stellar 2nd quarter), and the first quarter of 2001 was the first negative growth quarter in many years after which the recession was called in March 2001. This gave Bush several weeks in office before the recession officially began, so it’s probably safer to say that Bush inherited a "slowdown," which turned into a relatively mild recession.
The official date of the recession under Bush was March 2001 – November 2001, caused by the tech crash and 9/11. So it started under Bush's tenure. The current recession – far, far deeper – began in 2007, and was already a year-old by the time Obama came into office – with a very steep swoon in the last quarter of 2008. That's my point. I should not have used the term "boom" to describe the last quarter of 2000. But the fiscal results of the just-finished boom gave Bush a surplus – which he turned into our current massive deficit, by adding $5 trillion to the next generation's debt. Obama, in contrast, arrived when the federal coffers were running completely dry.
Just to reiterate how far the right has strayed from reality, here's a completely neutral account of the recession this time around:
The economy shrank in five quarters, including four quarters in a row. Two quarters shrank more than 5%, and Q2 2008 shrank a whopping 8.9%, more than any other recession since the Great Depression. The recession ended in Q3 2009, when GDP turned positive, thanks to economic stimulus spending. The recession was also the longest since the Depression, lasting 18 months.
Only crazies think that the stimulus did nothing or even, in Romney's ludicrous lie, "made things worse." Look: you can argue we should have let everything fail: the global financial system, the domestic auto industry and the entire economy. That's Ron Paul's point. It would "liquidate the debt" and, in his view, lead to a faster recovery. But Paul would also admit that this brutal nineteenth century style recession would – at this point – have made unemployment far higher than it now is.
Does anyone doubt that if Obama had taken the GOP's advice, they'd now be calling him the new Herbert Hoover?
The Dish 