Marta Cook over at Faithful Democrats just did a great post on the differences between how American families fared during the Clinton and Bush years.
She based her post on a report by Third Way (my favorite of the progressive think tanks). It’s well worth the time to read the entire post (and report, for that matter), but here are a few of the highlights from Marta’s post:
If income growth into the Bush years had kept up with the overall rate of growth during the Clinton years, the average American family would have pocketed $58,945 more from 2000 to 2008.
Between 1992 and 2008, gas prices have nearly tripled in real dollars. Third Way concludes, “The typical household will have spent $5,069 more for gas over the past eight years than it did from 1993 to 2000-or enough to pay nearly one year’s tuition at a public university“.
If the economy had kept up the same rate of growth during the Bush years as it did the Clinton years, America’s economy would be larger, to the tune of $1.017 trillion. In addition, between 2000 and 2006, the number of uninsured Americans increased by 8.56 million.
To be fair, there are always other factors than the President that affect these things, but imagine how different our world would be if only a few hundred little old ladies in FL had not voted for Buchanan…
posted October 20, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Whoa now, don’t go blaming FL-13. Buchannan was sued for election fraud for “losing” 13,000 votes. Leave the little old ladies alone!
I guess the only good that can come out of these disparaging numbers is the opportunity for Democrats to once again take office and revitalize the market, foreign relations, and everything else Bush has touched and destroyed. A new dawn is approaching and I can’t wait!
posted October 20, 2008 at 1:37 pm
These are staggering numbers and anyone paying the slightest attention to the news – or their own bank accounts – is seeing their political impact. But what concerns me more is the moral implications of these figures. Consider some of the factors that have contributed to this debt – war, our dependency on foreign oil, tax breaks for the rich. Each of these involves a myriad of moral and ethical issues from how we treat the sanctity of life, to the contempt we are showing for God’s creation, to materialism of the kind about which the Bible offers dire warnings. And the same moral threads appear when we consider what we have not be investing in – healthcare (a life issue), education (intimately related with poverty), alternative fuels (an important step in caring for creation). We must look at this report with an eye not only toward the political and economic failure it represents, but the moral failure as well.