Bush bolsters economy

The past four years have been one of the most trying times in recent history, and America has had the good fortune of seeing a great president rise to the occasion by grappling with issues that are in the best interest of this country for the long term. Beyond the implosion of the dot-com bubble, the economy has been humbled by terrorist attacks and corporate accounting scandals over the past four years, and the president’s move to encourage reinvestment into the economy through tax relief for all Americans has worked wonders in the face of this unprecedented combination of economic ills. Not only is home ownership at an all-time high, but, as the U.S. Department of the Treasury recently reported, more than 1.9 million new jobs have been created since last August and the falling unemployment rate is below what the Bureau of Labor Statistics determined what the average was for the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Despite all of the unprecedented stock market turmoil of the past four years due to corporate scandals, terrorism and reality popping the dot-com bubble, this administration has successfully been able to post these profoundly positive numbers while making this recession one of the shortest and most mild in history. Now that America is flourishing once again, there can be little doubt that the next four years will be one of economic triumph under President George W. Bush should he stick to his sound economic policy.Even those I have talked to who support Senator John Kerry disagree with his economic plan, as it will lead to nothing but disaster. Kerry, for example, has voted nearly 100 times for tax increases, but now claims to want a tax cut for the middle class. As former Howard Dean campaign spokesman Jay Carson noted about Kerry’s politically motivated shifts in stances, “When it was popular to be for the Iraq war, [Kerry] was for it. Now it’s popular to be against it, and he’s against it … He’s all over the place on this stuff.”The New York Times’ endorsement of Kerry failed to mention the economy at all, but, as its editorial seems to confess in its opening sentence, was “built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to” Kerry. As Bruce Bartlett of the National Center for Policy Analysis explains, “All Mr. Kerry has is the charge that everything Mr. Bush has done on the economy has been wrong … [A]nyone who is remotely open-minded is going to have a hard time believing that Mr. Kerry will do better. You can’t beat something with nothing.”Schnee can be reached at cschnee@campustimes.org.