...Republican policies of shifting the tax burden onto the Middle Class (lightening it for the top few percent) and hostility to regulation of business enterprises. This got us diminished demand for goods and services companies were seeking to sell and lowered economic growth and poor (i.e. zero) net job growth. Add in the hostility toward regulation of businesses and that created the TRICKLE DOWN - DEREGULATION DISASTER.
(emphases my own_JW)
The Aughts, the Lost Decade for the U.S. Economy, Workers
For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households. But since 2000, the story is starkly different.
The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.
It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism -- there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
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Regarding the Repulblican hostility towards regulation see: Predatory Lenders Partner in Crime - how the Bush administration went to court to stop 50 States Attorneys General from reining in predatory lenders using consumer protection laws Bush did this (using the office of the Comptroller of Currency) in 2004, a full 4 years before the Housing Bubble blew-up.
(emphases my own_JW)
"Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.
What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.
Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.
Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers. "
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Well, I guess one way to look at it is that we can thank Bush for establishing incontrovertably that the so-called 'Supply side' (Trickle Down) econo-comical theory is total bullshit (though most rational people already knew that).
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