Originally posted by Odysseus
The Congressional Budget Office -- run by an economist hand-picked by the Bush administration -- recently said the Bush plan's stimulative effect on the economy was "unlikely to be dramatic."
Moving toward a balanced budget provided stimulus in the mid 1980's, and an actual balanced budget provided the greatest period of economic growth in history in the 1990's. Supply side economics has always failed and is currently failing again.
People in America are always complaining about taxes. Fact: out of the world's 30 largest economys, America ranks 22nd in tax's collected as a percentage of GDP. That is not bad.
I think your representation of the economy in the 90s is kind of one sided here.
Although I too dislike Bush I think misrepresentation of facts is a bad case for argument.
In the 90s we had new technology that boomed out of control and it bumped the economy in a way never expected. The ".com" boom was one that never could have been predicted even by the most gifted.
Everyone and their mother was an overnight millionaire and they spent their money like there was no end in sight. Companies like Intel, Cisco, AMD, and many other tech based industrys saw the largest growth ever.
Once the new appeal wore off people started getting past the fad and started looking at what it really was. People realized that there were quality sites to visit and the low end ones dropped off.....and they dropped fast.
So from the large number of money making sites dropping off we see a slowing in the purchase of technology based products and the trickle down the chain begins.
What we are seeing right now is the economy trying to reel back in to pre .com times with the .com world still making a lot of the calls. The .com economy was one of the worst things to happen because it caused a "false" economy which was so volatile no one knew exactly what to do.
Cisco for example made 9 splits in its stocks in the course of 5 years (I believe this is correct) which is completely unheard of by any stretch of the imagination.
Clinton got lucky and came in to office at the beginning of the .com boom and left right as it wa falling apart. If you are going to make judgements like this then you need to look at the whole picture of what was going on rather than your one sided argument against Bush.