Slashdot Mirror
Harvard Business School Critical of Bush Economics
gregorantic writes "From BusinessWeek Online: 'George Bush, America's first President with an MBA, has been slapped on the knuckles by 169 concerned business-school professors.'"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It's often satisfying in its own childish way to trash on Bush for all the personal reasons-- the fake cowboy stuff, manipulation of 9/11, etc.-- but most often, the strongest argument against him is purely economic. His numbers simply do not add up.
See Paul Krugman of the New York Times for the most compelling case. His book, The Great Unraveling, is invaluable.
Something doesn't add up when one slashes taxes in the middle of a war, especially when we need the money to fight. Not that tax cuts are necessarily a bad thing, but having a deficit prevents the government from working effectively. Just my two cents.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Odd how they don't acknowledge that the economic deterioration began before he took office. Without that major acknowledgement, that makes their statements looks suspiciously partisan.
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
These guys are blaming Bush for things he has no control over. They want to cut waste out of the budget, but fail to admit that he has no facility to do so.
They fail the partisan test.
Look, it doesn't matter how much money the Feds take in, there will never be enough, and they'll always spend every cent they have. If they don't, that's only by accident -- don't worry, they'll make up for it the following year.
There's plenty of people in the US with their hand out ready to jump on the dole. Ride the Federal gravy train. There's plenty of Career Politicians up on Capitol Hill buying votes for their next term.
Therefore, I'm all for squeezing the Congressmen to try to cut costs from the Federal Budget by requiring a balanced budget, and then taking in as little in taxes as is possible to get passed through the Congress.
Unless the deficit gets way out of control with respect to GDP, it matters little one way or the other. The Federal Gov't is always the least efficient entity to get anything done -- and any taxes that get there are always a drag on the economy.
My affinity for hyperbole knows no bounds
Harvard and the Ivy League are bastions of the Democratic Party. If you had asked business professors from a conservative college (like, perhaps Hillsdale College in Michigan), I'm pretty sure they'd say Bush's policies are just fine, thanks.
Like it or not, we're in a partisan age, and everything is looked at through a political prism now.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yes, he does. If he was true to what the GOP says they believe in he would veto every spending bill till he got what he wants.
But he hasn't vetoed anything yet.
Bush's federal budget was full of numbers that didn't add up... He counted some money twice, slating the same money for Iraq and Social Security. There was lots of stuff anyone could see was the worst kind of deceitful trickery. We're not talking about little mistakes either, we're talking systematic abuse.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Look, these people come up with the models that everyone uses. If it weren't for them there would be no crap shoot. They know damn well that a single president is not responsible for the entire economy. The extremely anti-bush (though not extreme) economist brad delong at berkely goes on at length over the media's focusing on a president as the sole actor in an economy's performance.
All this being being said, it is entirely possible for a president to issue economic policies that are nothing but terrible; and that is what these professors are angry over.
Photos.
Krugman is a democrat first, and economist second. He's abandoned any pretense of fairness or objectivity in his columns. You might as well go to James Carville for economic advice.
Oh, and thanks for at least being honest about the pettiness of the Bush-hating (" It's often satisfying in its own childish way to trash on Bush for all the personal reasons").
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
>>Here?? At Slashdot??? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Yes actually, admitting that you're liberal here can get you modded troll/flamebait/overrated real fast. It's been extreme over the past month. I'm glad you think it's funny, because it means you haven't noticed it, and so it could be worse. But from a liberal point of view, slashdot has been or is being assimilated by the far right. Conservative leaning comments are modded insightful when they are nowhere near; insightful comments that have substance but are liberal get modded way down real fast. I'm not saying that no liberal comments are modded up or that all conservative comments are modded up, but it's a running battle.
The pressure and hostility are very real. I've very recently decided that I'm going to be as loud and openly pro-democrat as I can on slashdot, to do my part to keep the liberalness alive or at least half alive. You republicans may not realize this, but your party is very very good at propaganda. And liberals in general seem to have a hard time dealing with conflict based on raw emotion; we'd rather avoid the fight. Especially on a geek site like slashdot, lots of us avoid conflict.
Aww crap, I think I just bonded a little with you, DesScorp. If only because you don't know how much propaganda and suppression of dissent is going on, right here on /. let alone across the country on mainstream media (which are one step away from being state propaganda machines). Not just Fox News, but all the players repeat what they're told by the administration without question; there is no journalism, let alone investigative journalism.
Fellow liberal slashdotters, rise and criticise! Don't let the pro-bush people push their message here! If this is a liberal site, let's take it back! To arms! *dah*doot*dah*doot*! Don't back down! We're going to be called partisan anyways, let's go ahead and be partisan! There's a lot of complaining about Bush bashing, but I don't hear any, so either let's start rebutting the partisan conservatives who think anything liberal or critical is bush bashing, or let's *gasp* Talk About Bush's failures (which are legion)!! We've got a politics section, now let's rally! There's an election to be won! To arms! To arms! The Red states are coming! The Red states are coming!!
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Christ there is no contradiction there. "Well attendance was not that bad." is an extremely relative term and its depends on your idea of what "bad" is. It in no way, shape or form suggests he had a stellar/perfect attendance record in fact is suggests his attendance was not great, it just wasn't THAT BAD. "He missed quite a few" says exactly the same thing. He did miss some classes but he did show up most of the time, if his attendance was bad he would have said "he missed a lot of classes" and "his attendance was bad".
I'm dumbfounded you all are willing to hang this guy's credibility out to dry over this zealous parsing of two very vague phrases. I sure wish you could be so zealous about Bush administration statements about Saddam's ties to 9/11 and his WMD's all of which have proven to be outright lies, lies that have gotten a lot of people killed. Even worse they are at various times denying they said them or are still making the same assertions in the face of overwhelming reality. If you want to parse some statements and paint some people as liars why don't you work those over because they weren't even remotely vague and are increasingly, provably false.
@de_machina
And win Nobel prizes, apparently.
The USSR's economic policy was built on a house of cards - which is what eventually caused their demise. At the height of the cold war, the Soviet Union spent more than 70% of their GNP on war materiel (not a misspelling) and military operations. The United States never spent more than 10% of its GNP on the same. And when U.S. weapons finally went head-to-head with Soviet weapons during the liberation of Kuwait, Moscow knew that our M1s could kick the snot out of the Russian T72s, for example. Everything they threw at us was easily defeated by the advanced weaponry we had. That was what precipitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the communist state.
The Soviets kicked ass in WWII? The USSR lost almost 28 million lives (9 million military and 19 million civilian) - compare that to Germany's losses at 5.5 million (3.5 military/2 civvy). I'd say the Germans came out on the better end of that deal. It was only the fact that Germany was fighting the war on four fronts (Eastern Front, Western Front, African Front, Italian Front) and Stalin's paranoia that allowed the Soviets to make the progress they did toward Berlin at the end of the war.
Another example would be Kruschev's first visit to a U.S. supermarket. It took a lot of convincing before he would accept that it wasn't just for show, that it hadn't been set up just to impress him. The ordinariness of it was the kicker, the fact that there are tens of thousands of supermarkets just like it across the U.S. He held his head in his hands the entire flight back, as the enormity of the disparity between western prosperity and Soviet survival came crashing down on him.
Did you know it used to take two to five years to get an apartment in the USSR? There was a waiting list for almost anything you could afford to buy - cars (6-12 months), refrigerators (3 months), vacuums (3 months), etc. A friend of my fathers said that their lettuce used to look all the way through like the sometimes brown outer layer we throw away.
So I think we can safely say that the capitalist and Soviet-style communist economies isn't really equivalent.
Now, if you want to have an interesting discussion, consider the differences between Chinese and Russian communist economies. (Though the Chinese economy is starting to look more and more capitalist...)