by Sandy » Wed Aug 03, 2011 7:23 pm
Politics and impressions aside, this recession is the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, and will help him go down in history for what he was--the worst president in the history of the country. His economic policies, or lack thereof, helped export more than nine million American jobs to third world countries. Then, because the profit margins were mounting because of the exploitation of cheap labor, he cut tax breaks for the companies that were employing thousands of Indians, Indonesians and Vietnamese, and in some cases, subsidized them.
Corporate profit margins and profits themselves swelled to record levels during the last two years of the Bush administration, and yet unemployment soared as well, at least, in this country it did. That because those companies took their record profits, protected by tax cuts and government subsidies, and hired workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, the middle east, and even in the Gulf of Mexico, at low wages, which emptied the US of jobs. Bush's economic policy was to sit by and let them do it, and then shifted the burden of paying for the government services they needed to operate their businesses to the middle class. The energy price hikes and the tax burden was the greatest redistribution of this country's wealth in history. That busted the economy, killed jobs and put people out of work. Most of the jobs are permanently lost, unless some kind of policy can be initiated which forces corporations to produce their products in America, or forbids them from selling their stuff here.
The same corporations are spending billions of the dollars they make off of us by overcharging and underpaying their fair share of taxes on convincing us that we need to vote for the politicians who will just hand all of this over to them. I heard today that no fewer than 23 of the Republican members of the PA house of representatives have introduced legislation which they cut and pasted from websites operated by corporate interests. Hopefully, word about that will leak out and people won't be stupid enough to vote for those idiots.