Frisking the Books on Bush...

Backing high school my coach used to tell us, "Look at the score board when you go into the game, and look at it when you come out. That is how you judge your contribution."

I always took that to mean that if you the score was higher when you came out, no matter what the stats may say, you contributed to improving the teams lot. If you scored 30 points, and the team loses because you are there, that is less valuable then the person who scores 5 or none, but a win is managed.

So here we are in a new administration, and the Census Bureau has just released a scorecard, of sorts of the previous administration as reported by Ron Brownstein.

So the summary page on the economic experience of average Americans under the past two presidents would look like this:

Under Clinton, the median income increased 14 per cent. Under Bush it declined 4.2 per cent.

Under Clinton the total number of Americans in poverty declined 16.9 per cent; under Bush it increased 26.1 per cent.

Under Clinton the number of children in poverty declined 24.2 per cent; under Bush it increased by 21.4 per cent.

Under Clinton, the number of Americans without health insurance, remained essentially even (down six-tenths of one per cent); under Bush it increased by 20.6 per cent.

Adding Ronald Reagan's record to the comparison fills in the picture from another angle.

Under Reagan, the median income grew, in contrast to both Bush the younger and Bush the elder. (The median income declined 3.2 per cent during the elder Bush's single term.) When Reagan was done, the median income stood at $47, 614 (again in constant 2008 dollars), 8.1 per cent higher than when Jimmy Carter left office in 1980.

It is definitely worth a read. And honestly any republican politician who parrots the continual tax-cut as miracle remedy needs to answer for these numbers.

So that is the score we have of the bast 8 years. Well that and 2 wars, and ballooning deficits.

-Cheers