How the Bush Administration Ran the Country Into the Ground

Balkinization writes How the Bush Administration Ran the Country Into the Ground about a budge graphic in this New York Times story.

"The war in Iraq and accompanying defense spending, plus the badly designed Medicare Drug benefit, plus the Bush tax cuts, plus lax regulation of financial institutions (which necessitated a bailout supported by both President Bush and President Obama) turned a projected surplus under Bill Clinton into an enormous deficit and a relatively well-run nation into country burdened with enormous problems.

It would be one thing if these expenditures were a matter of national necessity that ultimately made the country better off. But they were not. The Bush tax cuts were primarily targeted to benefit the wealthiest Americans, and exacerbated a growing inequality of wealth in the United States. The Iraq War was a war of choice, justified by false claims of weapons of mass destruction and insinuations of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It proved to be a foreign policy disaster and an enormous waste of money which we must still shoulder. Deregulatory financial policies were unwise and unsound and helped push us toward the current Great Recession.

All in all, it is one of the most remarkable displays of ineptitude, greed, and corruption in American history. And now that they have run the country into the ground, President Bush's party, now thankfully out of power, is blaming the party that succeeded them, the Democrats, for the baleful effects of deficit spending. Colossal ineptitude is being followed by equally colossal chutzpah."