Rolling Stone article about Bush being the worst president ever

[yesthattom]

Worst Prez Eveah

A major historian writes in Rolling Stone magazine about how Bush will go down in history as the worst president ever. This survey of historians isn't indicating that university historians are left-leaning hippies. When also asked how far back one would have to go to find a worse president many went far enough back to include Reagan and other Republicans as a better presidents.

The value of the article, to me, is that it is an awesome list of all his mistakes.

Here's one example:

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

If you listen to The Randi Rhodes Show on the radio, she often tells people to dig back to their old IRS files and calculate the percent of their full income that went to taxes (that is: (total taxes paid that year) / (all income received that year) * 100). Pick a couple years under the Clinton tax plan and a couple years after the Bush tax plan (which un-did the Clinton plan). I assure you that you will find you paid less taxes under Clinton. It's a fun exercise that must confuse the Republicans that try it (if any of them do). The fact is that Republicans raise taxes and Democrats lower it.

How can Bush claim that he cuts taxes for everyone? If you put Bill Gates in a room with 40 homeless people, the average person in the room is a millionaire. Yet, why are 40 people in that room starving? If you average the HUGE tax cuts for the few billionaires that got cuts under the Bush plan along with the penny or two tax cut everyone else got, then the average tax cut is decent. So why aren't you happy with your bright, shiny penny?

Bush doesn't lie. He "parses". He finds a way to phrase something so that it isn't technically a lie. It is better than the double-speak in Orewell's "1984". It is the new tyranny.