Boom Or Bust, Has Our Economy Been Destroyed By President Bush?

Our economy is much tougher and complex than can be summarized in a few comments in a local newspaper or blog, which is where all the discussion over this issue is being debated. That being said, it is far easier for a government to destroy such an economy than to fix it.

And our government has done plenty to influence the economy, all with good intentions I'm sure. But in the long run, their fixes have backfired. Most of the blame for this falls directly on the Congress as they are the one's who manufacture all of the legislation that meddled where private industry, left to their own devices, would have done a much better job.

The President does become responsible in two ways. One, for legislation and government action that requires the President's signature, such as the highly irresponsible and pork laden transportation bill, and the other simply because he is the President, even if he was unaware of some of the things Congress was doing such as loosening monies so people who should never have obtained mortgages could get them.

When you have such a boom as created by Congress with the housing situation, you see things such as rampant fraud and a market that becomes artificially robust, much more than would ordinarily have happened if the matter had been handled responsibly. Eventually, a correction in the market must be made. The larger the economic boom that has been created outside of natural circumstances, the larger the correction.

We are largely feeling the pain of this correction now, and it is a huge correction to be sure.
Add in the fact that the government is meddling once again where it should not in the form of ethanol and bio-diesel, and that they have acquiesced much power to minority environmental groups that have prevented exploration and drilling for new sources of domestic oil, the construction of new refineries and nuclear power plants, and the pain becomes more acute, especially to the poor and elderly, the groups the government always claims to help the most.

But our economy is strong, strong enough that these things and many more have not completely destroyed it. By all accounts, we should be deep into a depression right now, but we are not. As slight as it is, our economy is still growing, which tells us more about it's resiliency than anything else.

In addition, the growth numbers would have been much larger had our economy not grown as much as it did over the last few years. .04% of today's economy is actually more growth than .04% of the economy even six years ago as the economy is much larger than it was then.