W. and the damage done .... Salon.com (man was bush a screw up)

[Botany]

A must read .... and pass it around the internets


http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/01/08/damage/print.html

W. and the damage done

President Bush inherited a peaceful, prosperous America. As he exits, Salon consults experts in seven fields to try to assess the devastation.
By Vincent Rossmeier and Gabriel Winant

Jan. 08, 2009 |

After a couple of presidential terms, mismanagement in every area of policy -- foreign, domestic, even extraterrestrial -- starts to add up. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he inherited peace and prosperity. The military, the Constitution and New Orleans were intact and the country had a budget surplus of $128 billion. Now he's about to dash out the door, leaving a large, unpaid bill for his successors to pay.


To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms -- sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.


snip

Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion


Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent


Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million


Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate


Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804


Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233


Of course, the government didn't sit idly by while our financial future was disappearing down the drain. Instead, the feds have pumped in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to juice lending and public spending.


Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval


Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far


And even though there's widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package, it still won't look pretty on the public balance sheet.


National debt: $10.6 trillion


Amount of that debt owned by China: At least $800 billion

snip

INFRASTRUCTURE


When that bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 and injuring 145, we started to remember that the prosaic details of infrastructure policy matter. Nuts and bolts can mean, quite literally, life and death. And the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi is not the only American thoroughfare suffering from underfunding and neglect.


Number of bridges judged structurally deficient: 70,000.


Number of major roads in mediocre or poor condition: Roughly one-third.


Meanwhile, the roads aren't only worn down, they're overcrowded. In part, we can thank an administration that gave tax credits to SUV buyers while targeting public transit for cuts.


The Bush White House's proposed cuts in public transit funding for fiscal year 2009: $202.1 million.


Though he capitulated in the face of overwhelming congressional majorities in favor of Amtrak, Bush threatened repeatedly to defund the national rail system altogether.


Target level of federal funding for Amtrak proposed by Bush in 2005: $0.


Budget cutting on that scale causes a decaying, obsolescent infrastructure. Fixing it won't come cheap. On Dec. 6, during his weekly address to the nation, President-elect Obama promised t0 make "the single largest investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s."


President-elect Obama's proposed infrastructure program: $375 billion to $475 billion.


Amount spent by FDR's Works Progress Administration, up through 1941: $11.4 billion -- adjusted for inflation, that's about $170 billion.

[bobd0]

1. Far worse than the needle. nt

[liberal N proud]

2. Tip of the iceberg

We will be uncovering damage caused by the bu$h regime for years.

[Winterblues]

3. Bush* has added more to the National Debt than all other Administrations combined.

They don't call them "Red Ink Republicans" for nothing...

[PDJane]

4. We have watched with dismay,

And seriously wondered why the US population couldn't see what was happening or didn't care.

This man is a bona fide member in good standing of the wrecking crew.