Pew Takes A Look At Before And After Bush
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Bush, Economy, History, Polls
What did Americans think in 2000 and what do they think in 2008?
The difference is striking.
A mere 13% of Americans are now satisfied with the way things are going in the country, compared with 55% eight years ago. And while 61% applauded at Clinton’s curtain call, only 24% approve of Bush’s performance as he leaves the national stage.
Why?
Well, all you have to do is look at the numbers to see how average Americans feel they’ve been shortchanged by this President…
I think the biggest factor here is that while GDP has gone up per capita, real median household income has gone down. That means we’ve been more productive, but haven’t been compensated for it.
Given that, our personal debt has increased significantly and nobody’s happy when they’re carrying even a small amount of debt, much less the $900 billion extra we’re collectively holding these days.
This is why I think Obama’s plan to “stimulate” the economy with targeted tax cuts makes a lot of sense. Nobody at the top needs the money, but the average American worker does just to keep their head above water. So it’s less a stimulus plan and more a stop gap to make sure people don’t fall through the cracks.
It’ll be interesting to revisit these numbers in 2012 and 2016 to see if anything has changed.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 and is filed under Bush, Economy, History, Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 6th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
While there’s no doubt that the Bush administration has failed in many ways, in the interest of fairness I think it should be at least noted that the president does not control those numbers 100%. There is plenty of blame to go around, especially considering many of those indicators have tanked since the Democrats have been in control of the legislative branch. If you adjusted your start date to 2006, you could make the opposite argument against the democrats.
But no one ever said being president was fair, so the buck stops with him and history will likely blame him for all of our woes, justly or not.
I do think the national debt numbers are especially damning though, considering he is a Republican and did very little in his eight years to restore fiscal responsibility.
January 7th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
The problem with speaking of the Democrats “controlling” anything since 2006 is that in fact the slim majority in the Senate combined with a Republican President means that in fact they have control over nothing. In fact most of the factors affecting the economy lie with the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and other executive branch organizations.
January 8th, 2009 at 6:00 am
[...] followup to Pew’s findings recently are the following numbers compiled by NBC: UNEMPLOYMENT RATE Then: 4.2% (Bureau of Labor [...]