Taxes and Economic Growth

So we supposedly had 7.2% growth last quarter, for which the Bush Administration is attempting to take credit. Skeptical me - first, even looking past the fact that even Bush is expressing that we should not expect a comparable rate of growth next quarter, I expect that the 7.2% figure to be revised down once it is no longer a hot story. More to the point, the lion's share of the credit seems to lie with consumer spending - giving support not to Bush's revised trickle-down, with massive tax cuts to the wealthy and next to nothing for the working classes, but to his father's characterization of such policies as "Voodoo Economics". It was such a priority to slash taxes for richest of the rich over the past three years, we supposedly couldn't afford tax relief for the rest of the nation - perhaps that is why we have had such a sluggish recovery, Mr. Bush?

The economic optimists argue that with this type of economic expansion, the economy "has to" add jobs - but will employers add jobs when they are told by the White House that this level of growth is an anomaly, where they know the tax rebate checks have been spent, and where they had excess capacity for production even before the economy took a nose dive? (Perhaps we should expect cheery announcements such as, "We added 300 temporary cleaning jobs, to dust the cobwebs off of the factory we've idled for the past three years.")

Meanwhile, Germany has become the world's largest exporting economy, and the biggest export of the U.S. seems to be the permanent exodus of unionized factory jobs. What are the odds that the jobs "created" under Bush to replace those we have permanently lost will be relatively low-wage, non-unionized jobs, with little or nothing in the way of benefits?

I'm not trying to lay responsibility for economic cycles at Bush's door, nor am I arguing that our nation wouldn't continue to lose good jobs even if a different administration were in power. I do, however, resent being played for a fool. Even assuming that Bush believes what his advisors are telling him, I find it insulting that they expect me to believe one line of (youknowwhat) after another.

(Meanwhile, we are told that a U.S.-imposed flat tax for Iraq is good, because it is like the tax system they have in Russia? Um... no comment necessary.)

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