Mary Mostert
August 1, 2003
Roosevelt’s war deficit 300 times bigger than George W. Bush’s
By Mary Mostert

Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe has really great timing. Every time he releases a statement telling us that the Bush economy is a disaster, the stock market promptly climbs. It happened again yesterday. On July 29th McAuliffe issued a statement entitled stating:

"Despite the Bush administration's best attempts to paint a rosy economic picture, their economic policies clearly are continuing to have a damaging effect on the country, as more and more Americans are without jobs.

The Democrats are really upset over the very idea of Bush asking for, and getting the tax cuts, especially those tax cut checks being delivered to the nation’s parents these days. On July 30th, as I write this, the stock market is up 160.93, to 9,360.98 an increase of 1.74% over the previous day. On March 12th of this year the stock market closed at 7,552.07. In four months the market, under George W. Bush’s damaging influence, has risen 1,808.91, or 24%.

If I wanted to be unkind I might point out that Clinton economic boom five years ago, that McAuliffe and his buddies wish we could return to, actually started stumbling in 1998. On August 18, 1998 the market closed at 8,714.70 and dropped for the next 13 days 1275.60 point to 7,539.10. That was a drop of 15% in 13 days. Of course, before the 2002 election I WAS unkind enough to warn a friend against dumping her stock based on advice that the market was about to crash.

When George W. Bush was not in the White House, most of the media and the Democrats thought that sharp rises in the stock market and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) were signs of an growing economy, not a damaged economy. In fact, even when the GDP dropped sharply, during Clinton’s tenure in the White House, it was not considered newsworthy negative event.

Yet, yesterday’s announcement that the US economy showed a second quarter increase in the GDP for some reason got more NEGATIVE press than the .6 % LOSS of GDP reported in the third quarter of 2000 during the so-called “Clinton economic boom.) Somehow, the “faltering” Bush economy has produced a 3% rise in GDP from -.6 to a +2.4 over the Clinton “boom” of 2000 and the media and the Democrats tell us that isn’t good enough to re-elect him.

Do any of you readers out there recall ANY Democrat or any media expressing worrying that the minus .6% GDP during the final months of the Clinton Administration was in any way damaging to the American economy? I didn’t think so.

This surge in the economy is taking place in spite of a drumbeat of hysterical media and political commentary on the subject that has warned us in recent months:

The Guardian, London: “Could a faltering dollar and global rebellion against its values presage the decline, and eventual fall, of the American empire?”

Hussain Khan (Tokyo - Prior to the 2002 election) — “Wall Street Scandals Leading to Loss of American Leadership — “When we turn to the political and diplomatic impact that the White House, and maybe the whole of America, has real cause for alarm. The domestic political implications of the scandals are easy enough to define. … With the Bush Administration identified so closely with tax cuts for the rich and corporate welfare for big business, a populist campaign against economic abuses in both Wall Street and Washington would give the Democrats a good chance of electoral success.”

Trying to convince Americans that Republicans are going to cause the Stock Market to crash and the economy to collapse has been part and parcel of Democrat political techniques since Roosevelt introduced it in the 1932 election. Scaring the daylights out of the public has worked.

© Mary Mostert

 

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Mary Mostert

Mary Mostert is a nationally-respected political writer. She was one of the first female political commentators to be published in a major metropolitan newspaper in the 1960s... (more)

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