Nocera on the Bush Legacy

Joe Nocera is generally disillusioned with everyone at this point.  I found that his New York Times piece this morning very much captured the zeitgeist of this moment, economic disgust and all.

Here’s his take on the shambles this nation was left in from the Bush Presidency:

Has any president in American history left behind as much lasting damage as George W. Bush? In addition to two unfinished wars, he also set us on the path to our current financial mess. The Bush tax cuts, which turned a surplus into a growing deficit, have been disastrous. As James Fallows pointed out in a prescient 2005 article in The Atlantic predicting a meltdown, they reduced tax revenue “to its lowest level as a share of the economy in the modern era.” (In its downgrade report, S.& P. suggested that it did not believe that Congress would let the cuts expire at the end of 2012, as they’re supposed to.) Then, in 2003, Bush pushed through prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients. David M. Walker, then the comptroller general, described 2003 as “the most reckless fiscal year in the history of the Republic,” adding some $13 trillion in future entitlement costs.

And he’s got equal vitriol for yesterday’s Obama performance.  Get ’em Joe.

Source:

While the Markets Swoon … (NYT)