It must be terrible for the president to be haunted by this ghost of George W. Bush. Truly, the haunting resembles Stephen King’s “The Shining.” But in the end of the film “The Shining,” it turned out that Jack Nicholson was actually haunting himself.
Could this be the reason why nothing is good in the White House today? Could be it that the ghost of George W. Bush has at last left the scene, and that we only lost our credit rating because President Obama is haunting himself?
Let’s see how the words match up from the White House: “It isn’t the present administration that is at fault for today’s economy (it’s the fault of the ghost of George W. Bush, who is lingering around the White House and rattling chains like Marley).” Did you see that? Hidden in the words of our President, Barack Obama is still pointing at George W. Bush for today’s economic downward spiral.
My point here is that if Barack Obama is trying to prove — while he is standing there and talking brilliantly — the buck stops for America’s dysfunctions way back there, but Obama should go even further back. He should be blaming the ghost of Bill Clinton for starting the momentum of America’s shrinking wealth.
I realize today that we are pelted with so much information from the practically infinite websites on the Internet and the cable stations that our long-term memories now last only about a couple of years. But somewhere we can find recorded that by the time he was through Bill Clinton had shrunken America’s stock-market holdings into an apple-size amount. I say that because when America was looking for money this summer to pay its debt, we found less active currency in our coffers than had Apple Computer.
In fact, as soon as George W. Bush stepped in office, he did all sorts of things to stop the America’s wealth from shrinking further. Surely many of you remember these federal checks for $300 George W. sent to you in early 2001 to help turn back Bill Clinton’s incredible shrinking economy.
My father who taught micro-economics to young college students would have explained much better than I can the difference between the pure economics under the Reagan Administration and the impurities in that flat-global, non-tariff Clinton economic program that has sent us to the poorhouse.
Clinton created a house-of-cards economic globalism that fell out into other nations and off-shore sites. Reagan in contrast created a self-contained supply-side economy that may have indeed trickled down to the poor. But the poor in the Reagan administration used their trickled-down money to buy in America and to recycle America’s wealth.
My late father used to say that the key to making a nation wealthy with pure capitalism is not just to make the rich richer, like in third-world countries, but to make the poor richer, as in super-power economies. He would point out that the rich always tended to spend more than half of their wealth to foreign, foreign, foreign lands. The very rich in fact invest most of their fortunes into off-shore inventories, off-shore factories, German cars, Italian shoes, French couture and art, houses in Gstaad and accounts in Zurich.
But when the American poor received more money, they would re-invest it back into America. In great contrast to the American wealthy, the American poor would buy everything in America.
Basically, over the past ten years, with the stubborn lingering effects of Clinton globalism the rich have gotten richer, and poor have become poorer, and an increasing number of the middle class continue to move into the class of the poor. That is basically how the Democrats under Clinton started shrinking our wealth to the tiny third-world size existing today.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.