It's Still Bush's Fault

Well...it worked in '08

It's still George W Bush's fault you know, and Obama is already running around the country telling everyone that is why the economy is in a shambles. See, there's this car, and Bush was driving it, I guess to his ranch in Texas or something. Well, maybe it was a pickup truck, like with the big steer horns on the front, and a gun rack in the back of the cab. So Bush was driving this very Texas-looking truck and for some reason he drove it into a ditch. And instead of doing the sensible thing and calling, like, a tow truck to get it out, he gave the keys to Obama to try and get the truck out of the ditch.

So, Obama took the keys and then tossed them into the ditch with the truck in it, and stood on the side of the road  for over three years with a cardboard sign that said "Look what Bush did to his truck. It's all his fault. Also, am poor, need tax money.". Somehow, this is some weird analogy for the economy that Obama tells people, and it makes sense to, I don't know, people who can't afford a truck and wouldn't know about ditch-extraction techniques. I don't really understand all these vehicles in ditches that the President keeps mumbling about, and he especially loses me when he talks about how "Reverse" starts with an "R", and "Drive" starts with a "D", like it's an episode of Sesame Street or something. C is for "Cookie" too Mr. President. Throw that one in your speech since everyone likes cookies.

So, I guess what really confuses me about this whole vehicle economy ditch thing and blaming Bush, is the blaming Bush part. I mean, he was a President, and so he couldn't drive the whole economy into a ditch by himself. There are checks and balances and whatnot in government that prevent one guy from doing something like that. I mean, a president can completely fail by not doing anything helpful, I suppose, but to cause something like an economic collapse? That's a tall order for only one branch of government, much less one person. 

I think the error in this Obama analogy is in thinking of the economy as a single vehicle. The economy is more like a whole bunch of cars and trucks and stuff... a whole highway full of them. And they go this way and that and at the end of the day most all of them get to where they are going. While one idiot driver can cause an accident and cause a traffic jam, there are other lanes, and there is another direction that traffic can go, so by himself, one guy can't hope to stop all traffic on a major highway without doing something really crazy and on purpose. 

Now, if two people, one on each side of the highway, caused two major accidents at the same time, they could block all traffic in both directions. This would be like what happened to the economy toward the end of Bush's time in office, when the effects of congress and presidents dating all the way back to Carter sabotaged the housing market by guaranteeing mortgages to people who could never hope to pay them. These "cars" began to pile up over the decades until everything came to a screeching halt, during Bush's second term. 

To continue this horrible, but better than Obama's, analogy, how long an accident keeps traffic stopped depends on how bad it is, and how emergency responders react to it. Presidents are kind of like emergency responders. See, they don't generally cause these kinds of things, but they can make them worse if they respond to them improperly. So Bush didn't cause the mess, and neither did Obama, or other presidents before them. Because presidents don't have that much power, and policy changes take far too long to cause something that drastic in a relatively short amount of time. 

What presidential policy does effect, is response to crises. Positive response is still generally slow to take effect, but bad response can make things worse rather quickly. Both Bush and Obama are guilty of poor decisions in the middle of the economic crises. In effect, neither called the darned tow truck, and both put it in (D)rive trying to take the truck up and out of a ditch when it could never do so. This was in the form of Bailouts and TARP and silly crap like that. Obama takes even more blame for complicating the situation further by destabilizing the private sector with his stupid stupid ObamaCare, and with his taxing the rich rhetoric. For three years now, business owners have had to deal with not knowing what their taxes and health care expenditures will look like the next year. And so they don't hire people.

Blaming Bush for this economic mess we got into is dishonest. Blaming Bush for how he responded to it, and made it somewhat worse is fine. But the lions share of that blame goes to Obama. So next time you hear the President mumbling about cars in ditches and inheriting a mess, and how he has made things better, laugh, because that last part is hilarious, and then turn the channel. You shouldn't be watching MSNBC anyway...

Feel free to comment below. Please keep it civil and respect my no-cussin' policy.