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Asking the question "what if?"
An article to ponder
<i> "The Bush, Hoover, Roosevelt Connection"
There’s nothing like a tasty discussion of politics to send voters into a political feeding frenzy, and with a presidential election right around the corner, the blue-light specials are being served.
Everyday Americans gorge themselves on political spin in order to satiate their appetite to criticize instead of nourishing a healthy hunger for knowledge. Without desire to conduct any research on their own or actually investigate any of the drivel they hear from the media or the political hacks, they devour the propaganda and quickly run back for seconds.
One of the best selling specials on the menu recently has been the issue of job creation-manipulation that seems to be the gold standard in the 2004 election.
Everyone loves quoting the job creation statistic from the Census Bureau and compare the data from Bush’s first term to that of Clinton’s. Though the data is only an hors d’oeuvre, to the Bush-hates it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
However, they conveniently fail to address a different set of data that shows the complete opposite. During Clinton’s first term in office, unemployment averaged six percent while under Bush it has averaged 5.5 percent. Unlike the job creation statistic, the unemployment data suggests that a smaller percentage of people were looking for work during the Bush administration’s first term, indicating clearly that more people had jobs with Bush in office than with Clinton.
But if it is true that more people had jobs during Bush’s first term, why is such a fuss being made over the infinite number of jobs being sent overseas due to outsourcing? If so many American jobs are now in Pakistan (or wherever), one might easily conclude that the outsourcing problem was worse during Clinton’s first term when a higher percentage of people were out of work. Coincidentally, the same people who are now hysterical over America’s current outbreak of outsourcing seem convinced the epidemic all started the moment Bush took office.
While there is no question that approximately 800 thousand jobs are gone since 2001, isn’t it feasible that many or most of these jobs were lost due to the recession, the corporate scandals, and 9-11?
After all, from September 2001 through February 2002 (the six months immediately following 9-11) almost 1.5 million jobs disappeared. Are we to believe that during these six months 1.5 million American jobs were outsourced, or is it likely they were lost in the wake of America’s darkest tragedy?
Then again, if outsourcing were really a problem, wouldn’t there be a much greater dent in our economy than the loss of 800 thousand jobs and a much higher unemployment rate of only 5.4 percent?
If it is true that we’re losing so many jobs, why has there been an increase of over 1.5 million jobs in 2004 alone accompanied by 13 consecutive months of positive job growth (with still three months of positive trending data to consider)?
In all likelihood there will be over two million jobs created in 2004 despite the fact that four hurricanes have ravaged the Southeast. Yet liberals equate today’s economy as an American catastrophe?
One need only look at Europe to determine whether America’s economy is a colossal failure. Since 1999 unemployment in Italy has averaged 10.1 percent, France has averaged 10 percent, Germany has averaged 10.2 percent, and Spain has averaged 13.3 percent, while the U.S. is barely over five percent.
Even Canada is high at 7.4 percent when compared to America. Yet Americans are told that the economy is in the toilet while our European and Canadian friends are laughing all the way to the hospital to cash in on their free medical coverage.
Instead of overindulging on political propaganda, perhaps we ought to be simply reading our history books (preferably older ones). Maybe if more of us did we wouldn’t fall for the bit about Bush’s economy being as bad as Hoover’s whose unemployment rate averaged 12.8 percent.
Of course there’s really nothing to compare when it comes to Presidents Bush and Hoover. The Hoover economy lost three times as many jobs as the Bush economy with less than half the population. In 1929 when the population was 121 million, a job loss of 2.2 million was indeed a disaster. However, today a job loss of 800 thousand equates to a national unemployment rate of only 5.4 percent since the population is now 290 million.
Instead of comparing Bush to Hoover, perhaps a better comparison would be to FDR. Both presidents inherited a receding economy, both endured sneak attacks on their watch, and both undertook war campaigns the likes of which America had never seen. The big difference economically is that under Bush tax rates have been reduced, unemployment rates have been low, and recovery has been swift.
FDR on the other hand oversaw an economy rank with price-controls, deflation, and unemployment rates that were higher than Hoover’s not only years after Hoover was gone but also years after the implementation of the New Deal (which turned out to be a raw deal considering taxes were increased some 200 and unemployment continued to soar).
It’s a good thing for FDR that Pearl Harbor wasn’t attacked until his third term in office giving him a full eight years to focus specifically on the economy, unlike Bush who had to deal with disaster after disaster after disaster all within the first year of his presidency.
Maybe if George W. Bush had been elected in 1932, the Great Depression would not have been so severe. Bush’s handling of an economy in 2001 that had within months been devastated by the destruction of America’s most prestigious and important economic facility, devastated by the fear of future terrorist attacks, devastated by corporate scandal, devastated by the fact our defense nerve center had been struck, devastated by an imploding stock market, and weakened by a prior administration’s failure to react to an impending recession shows his economic prowess. Perhaps FDR should have attended Harvard’s Business School and learned a few things about economics himself.
Further comparisons between FDR and Bush might reveal that a Bush presidency in 1932 would have preemptively dealt with Hitler before the lunatic became a menace to Europe instead of watching the Nazi invasions of the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium and still failing to act.
Even the Battle of Britain wasn’t enough for FDR to take appropriate action. Had Hitler been stopped prior to 1940, not only would the Jews of Europe have been saved but the Japanese would certainly have been deterred from attacking America, saving countless American and Japanese lives in the Pacific.
One could even argue that a World War Two president Bush would have supported whole-heartedly the English Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and not catered to Stalin at Yalta.
Had FDR heeded Churchill’s warnings and not supported Stalin (which ultimately led to the U.S. betrayal of Chiang Kai-Shek), the Chinese Nationalists would have defeated Mao-Tse-Tung’s communist forces, wars in Korea and Vietnam and would therefore have been avoided, and Eastern Europe would have been saved from 50 years of communist hell.
Maybe such a scenario is a stretch, but the facts certainly back it up. Bush’s strongest and most loyal ally in the war on terror is the British Prime Minister and America’s national security has been redefined by a policy of preemption.
These two ingredients alone would have completely changed the events leading up to World War Two and arguably prevented hundreds of millions of deaths not only by preventing the Great War but also in refusing to allow communism from getting a foothold in Asia and Eastern Europe. Peace in our time, indeed!
When we inundate ourselves on revisionist history we end up with no understanding of the past, no perspective of the present, and no outlook for the future. We find ourselves on the wrong side of conflicts, inadvertently supporting hidden agendas, flawed policies, and unqualified leaders.
While exhausting our energy and precious resources in pursuit of failed ideologies, our ability to deal with challenges and real dangers become greatly limited.
While there is no question things today could be better economically, only a society of the illiterate or brainwashed could look at today’s economy and actually believe it’s as bad as Hoover’s.
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