The Bill: W and the Damage Done (excellent information from Salon)

[roguevalley]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/01/08/damage/ (seven experts in different fields assess the damage so far. nice email to puke friends about their lies)

Example:

The Economy:

Until not too long ago, President Bush's supporters could be heard to argue that the economy was the unheralded success story of his administration. In 2006, Larry Kudlow called it "The Greatest Story Never Told." While praising Bush, Ramesh Ponnuru decried the unfairness of it all. "It seems to happen every week: Some new piece of good economic news comes out, and Republicans sink a little deeper in the polls." To share their admiration, it helped if you ignored the way the wealth was being distributed. Or if you were a repo man.

But the whole debate became moot on Sept. 15, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Now the economy may be the most burdensome of all the Bush legacies that Barack Obama will have to shoulder.

The current financial and economic crisis has grown so massive, consuming everything in sight, that one might be able to forget that it started with bad mortgages. Well, one could try to forget, as long as one still has a home, or is not among the nearly one in four mortgage-holders whose homes are worth less than the debt on their homes.

How bad is it? "An average recession is one in which we lose about 3 percent of GDP. Three percent of GDP is about $500 billion," UCLA economist Lee Ohanian told Salon. "It's not inconceivable that this could be twice as worse, which would be close to a trillion."

How much poorer are we going to get before we start getting richer again? Here are some (scary, morbid, gruesome) clues.

Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion

Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent

Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million

Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate

Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804

Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233

Of course, the government didn't sit idly by while our financial future was disappearing down the drain. Instead, the feds have pumped in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to juice lending and public spending.

Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval

Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far

And even though there's widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package, it still won't look pretty on the public balance sheet.

National debt: $10.6 trillion

Amount of that debt owned by China: At least $800 billion

[Kolesar]

1. We can cut $Billions in unproductive weapons and use it for something to stimulate the economy...eom

[roguevalley]

2. I hope his line item gal does the job.