Echo Chamber: If Only....

"It's sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom. It's almost a lost economic decade."
--Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com

TW: Below is a blog post from US News & World Report journalist Jim Pethokoukis. He is a supply side conservative acolyte of Larry Kudlow and Art Laffer. His post demonstrates the delusional behavior of someone glued to a defunct ideology. He just will not let go of cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes. How do they rationalize their views? by assuming away the facts.

From Pethokoukis at USNWR:
"Before the recession, we were headed toward a surplus. A useful reminder of economic reality from Jim Glassman of JP Morgan Chase:

The US response to the economic crisis at the beginning of this decade is an affirmative lesson on how to address economic crises. The combined actions of the Bush Administration, the 2001 tax cut agreement, together with two major rounds of economic stimulus measures, including investment incentives and a reduction in the capital gains and dividend taxes, added up to about 5% of GDP all told. This was the biggest fiscal response in memory, since World War II, up to that point. At first the budget deficit deteriorated, as budget hawks at the time were quick to point out. By 2004 the surplus of 2000 and turned into a budget deficit of about 4% of nominal GDP. But the bold fiscal response hastened the recovery and by 2007 the deficit had declined to 1% of GDP. The government’s books would have recorded a small surplus in 2007 had it not been for the $200 billion tab for the commitments in the Middle East and the aid to the New Orleans area that is recovering from the damage from Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005."

TW: So just a couple of small assumptions and voila a surplus:
1) If we had not had the current recession, the worst in at least 25 year along with the related credit crisis the worst since GD 1.0. Life would be so much simpler without those pesky recessions which of course had nothing to do with financial bubbles perpetuated during the W Administration.
2) Lets assume away that little skirmish in Iraq and the ubiquitous GWOT and Katrina (it takes some cojones to use Katrina as an excuse for W. Bush)

And oh btw, W. Bush inherited a $200+ billion annual surplus. These people should not be in government or compensated to spread their ignorance.