Joseph Stiglitz: Bush is dead wrong

[muriel_volestrangler]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1320596,00.html

But these statistics mask a glaring fact: the average American family is worse off than it was three-and-a-half years ago. Median income has fallen by over $1,500 in real terms, with families being squeezed as wages lag behind inflation. In short, all that growth benefited only those at the top of the income distribution, the same group that had done so well over the previous 30 years and benefited most from Bush's tax cut.

For example, some 45 million Americans have no health insurance, up by 5.2 million from 2000. Families lucky enough to have health insurance face annual premiums that have nearly doubled, to $7,500. Families also face increasing job insecurity. This is the first time since the early 1930s that there has been a net loss of jobs over the span of a presidential administration.
...
In August, I joined nine other American Nobel prize winners in economics in signing an open letter to the public. We wrote: "President Bush and his administration have embarked on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation ... The differences between President Bush and John Kerry with respect to leadership on the economy are wider than in any other presidential election in our experience. President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem."

[izzie]

1. The thing is if your for Bush this does not seen to bother you.

I am not sure why. A lot of Bush's base seem to be low income people so this is not what they must vote for.So is it really social things that they vote for?

[Maeve]

2. I think it is

Like the Reagan Democrats--they are an underclass who don't understand why people who don't play by the rules they were taught to follow are the ones getting ahead. They look for someone to explain it and accept the demonization of "liberals", "humanists", all the "nontraditionalists" who have changed the country from "the way it always (never) was". They look for security in an insecure world and find it in the paternal arms of the rightwing.

[Wright Patman]

3. In biblical terms

(and this is what tens of millions of them go by, so it fits), they have been sent a "strong delusion" and "believe a lie."

They are constitutionally (and maybe intellectually as well) incapable of honestly looking at issues. They "can't handle the truth" and, unlike the Tom Cruise character in the movie, really do not want the truth to begin with.