Hey, I hope you didn't give up! At last I'm back with more things George Bush, Jr. had nothing to do with!

I recall it very clearly. One week shortly after he took office Time magazine put George Bush, Jr. on the cover as "Man of the Year." The cover story the next week or two later was, "What Will Your Family Do in the Impending Economic Crisis?" At the time all you heard about was the budget surplus that had us covered for the forseeable future, and people in their early 20's and 30's moving into loft spaces to make hi-tech millions and then jetting over to the south of France to test-drive their new Lamborghinnis. Crisis? What crisis?

The next thing you knew long-standinng companies like K-Mart and Service Merchandise were bankrupt and millions of people like me were all over the place looking for jobs and not finding much. (Oddly, fresh out of college with little experience I had several people calling me for interviews and offering jobs. After George W. took office, when I had four years of experience, prizes and achievements on my resume, I couldn't get an interview for stockboy!) My parents probably don't want it out on the Internet, but they had also been thrilled to have greatly multiplied their savings in the stock market and were looking forward to further gains. Instead they're only just now getting back to where they started.

When Bush, Sr. had been president I was rocked back on my heels to see two of my bestest buddies' dads suddenly out of work, looking stoop-shouldered and glum and wondering how they would ever get their lives back where they were. I was scared to death to experience that. Then Clinton came around and everyone was doing better than ever. Now Bush, Jr. was in and I was right where my friends' dads had been. Hmm...I see a link. And it ain't the Bush's fault! Clinton had just deceived us all into thinking things were great for eight years! He even fooled the stock market!

The Bush administration's explaination is that the Internet bubble had already burst while Bill Clinton was president. Bush, Jr. was just the unlucky inheritor of an already-bad situation. The National Bureau of Economic Research, who's probably a bunch of liberal liars out to embarass our wise leader, see it otherwise:

[To define a recession,] economists rely on the...measurements of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of recessions and expansions.NBER has been run since 1977 by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, an architect of the Bush tax cut and an intellectual mentor to many prominent Republican policy-makers, including Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. According to NBER's definition, the recession did not begin until after President Clinton left office....According to NBER, the economy peaked and started shrinking in March 2001, two months after the Bush presidency began. "The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began in March." So according to NBER, the most recent recession did not start during the Clinton administration.

Whatever the NBER says is really secondary to me. I know what I experienced first hand, and I know who was running things the first time things went to shit and the second. And it was neither Bush's fault! Who's fault was it besides the person with the highest office in the land who's charged with the the well-being of the nation? I don't know. Probably Jesse Jackson.

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