Saturday, January 23, 2010
Want a recession? Hire a Bush
Some folks have done the research and crunched the numbers and the result is in. Two Bush presidents and three recessions, one with daddy and two with the idiot bastard child.
NBER defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” NBER uses multiple indicators, rather than any single measurement of activity.The Bush family is good for something, not that a sane person would want it.
Let’s look at some data from the Reagan era as an example. According to NBER researchers, an economic peak occurred in July 1981 — signaling the start of a recession that lasted for 16 months until a November 1982 trough. That’s all there is to it.
Now let’s fast-forward to recent history. Three peaks have occurred since the 1982 trough, in:
* July 1990 (after 92 months of expansion) and the contraction lasted for 8 months;
* March 2001 (after 120 months of expansion) and it too lasted for 8 months;
* December 2007 (after 73 months of expansion). At this writing, we don’t know how long it will last.
What do these three recessions have in common? They all occurred under a Bush, the first under George H.W. and the second and third under George W.
What makes this data worthy of a BushToll nugget is President Bush’s and Vice President Cheney’s insistence as far back as 2002 that they inherited a recession from Bill Clinton. Not only is this false (Clinton’s eight-year term in office saw uninterrupted economic expansion), it’s become irrelevant in light of the current recession and economic collapse.
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