[Xantar]

2) Down with Kyoto Treaty: I know immediately you might see this as a big negative, but thats on first blush. The fact is this had almost nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with One World Politics, as was admitted by UN officials. China was never going to sign that treaty and for America to do so would have held the US under a severe disadvantage for the long term and would have damaged our economy considerably. There are better ways to be eco-friendly without hamstringing ourselves.

I have a question, and really I'm just curious because I think you do make a good point and it's not my intention to try to refute it. But my question is: what do we do about China? They are the world's second biggest polluter, and at the rate they're going, they'll surpass even the United States about 20 years from now. And they know that imposing environmental policies on themselves could cripple their long-term economic prospects. And it's not like anybody could threaten them with military or economic sanctions. No sane diplomat would suggest enforcing an embargo against China or anything. So what do we do about them?

3) Security: The fact is there haven't been any attacks since 9/11 and President Bush's policies in this area have helped lead to the thwarting of at least 2 documented attack plans by our enemies. There may have been even more. If you don't believe that number, fine, check for yourselves.

If you're including the liquid explosives plot from last week in your "2 documented attack plans by our enemies," I'm not sure we should give Bush all that much credit. The terrorists were all British citizens attempting to board planes in London. Also, the main intelligence source in thwarting the plot is known to be a British agent who infiltrated the terrorist ranks. A lot of praise has also been given to Pakistan for providing valuable intelligence to the British to help them confirm that an attack was in the planning stages.

It would have been a terrible attack, and it's great that the British were able to stop it. But I'm just not sure President Bush's policies were all that instrumental.

Originally Posted by Professor S

And Jason1, could you explain to me what you consider a booming economy to be? Our unemployment IS LOW (sorry Typhoid it is), our stock market is still doing well even if it has evened out lately, our GNP continues to rise and our revenues to the government continue to increase even though taxes were cut. How is that not a booming economy? Most of these standards were met under Clinton and that is viewed as the end all of economies even though it was build on a false basis (internet companies).

First of all, the fact that our GDP (or GNP, if you prefer to use that) continues to rise means nothing. It's almost always rising. And we've already been over the tax numbers. The very IRS numbers that you dug up several months ago show that tax revenue dropped drastically after Bush's tax cuts and are only just now approaching the levels of the later years of the Clinton administration.

Anyway, GNP is not the only measure of the economy. A look at the median income is also revealing. This is a decent table from the Census Bureau. It shows that from 1980 to 2000, the average increase in inflation adjusted median income for men was about $194.15 per year and $346.80 per year for women (the fact that women's income is rocketing up compared to men is pretty interesting, too, but that's another discussion). From 2001 to the end of 2004, inflation adjusted median income for men and women fell despite the fact that everybody got a tax cut. The last time median income fell was during the recession in the later years of the first Bush Administration. And the last time it happened before that was right before and during the recession of the early 1980s. Also, this PDF file shows that our poverty rate has been steadily climbing since 2001.

I'm not pointing this out just to because I'm liberal and I hate inequality. These numbers are also bad for the economy. Note that in the second link I provided, only a brief period in 2001 is declared as a recession. What these numbers are showing is that GDP has been growing all the rest of the time, but people haven't been growing richer along with the economy. You can understand intuitively how this is bad for us. The economy is literally driven by people's spending. When people have more money to spend, they buy more stuff which gives the people they buy from more money to spend which means they buy more stuff etc. When people have increasingly less money to spend, the opposite spiral takes effect. What's been happening recently is that our economy has been growing by squeezing more labor out of workers without matching wage increases to keep up. This is not sustainable in the long term. Eventually, either wages have to catch up to the growing GDP (inflation) or GDP growth has to slow down.

By the way, I tend to think that the boom years during the Clinton Administration are mostly attributable to the tight economic policies of the elder President Bush. Clinton was smart enough not to screw everything up, but it is the nature of our economy that the beneficial effects of our fiscal policies are not usually felt in full force until the next administration. I don't think the ultimate effect of George W. Bush's policies will not be known until 2008.

Also, what brought this thread on anyway? I don't like President Bush, but it's not like he suddenly became bad this month. Right now he's pretty much acting the way he always has, and there hasn't even been a major scandal lately.