Revising the Bush Administration Timeline

To listen to the Bush administration history revisionists and legacy reconstructionists one would think that his 2 terms in office started on September 12, 2001. For years they have reminded us how President Bush "kept us safe" for over 7 years following 9/11, which is kind of like saying that other than the iceberg incident the captain of the Titanic had an impeccable safety record.

Now that Republicans are running on a platform of taking us back to the good old days of the Bush economic policies, they have to cover over that gaping hole in the side of the HMS Bushonomics, so a little revision and timeline shifting is necessary there as well. Paul Krugman explains:

"On the economy: Last week Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, declared that "there's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy." So now the word is that the Bush-era economy was characterized by "vibrancy."

I guess it depends on the meaning of the word "vibrant." The actual record of the Bush years was (i) two and half years of declining employment, followed by (ii) four and a half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight-year average under Bill Clinton, followed by (iii) a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of the "Bush boom," such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000.

[...]

On the deficit: Republicans are now claiming that the Bush administration was actually a paragon of fiscal responsibility, and that the deficit is Mr. Obama's fault. "The last year of the Bush administration," said Mr. McConnell recently, "the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it's almost 10 percent."

But that 3.2 percent figure, it turns out, is for fiscal 2008 -- which wasn't the last year of the Bush administration, because it ended in September of 2008. In other words, it ended just as the failure of Lehman Brothers [Lehman filed for bankruptcy on September 15] -- on Mr. Bush's watch -- was triggering a broad financial and economic collapse. This collapse caused the deficit to soar: By the first quarter of 2009 -- with only a trickle of stimulus funds flowing -- federal borrowing had already reached almost 9 percent of G.D.P. To some of us, this says that the economic crisis that began under Mr. Bush is responsible for the great bulk of our current deficit. But the Republican Party is having none of it."

George Walker Bush, 43^rd President of the Unites States. January 20, 2001--January 20, 2009. September 12, 2001--September 14, 2008. There, fixed it.