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Bush V. Gore – an example essay reflecting on of our Living Through History:  

In December 2000, the outcome of the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore favored Bush.  Gore, then Vice President, was a vestige of the outgoing Clinton administration.  Bush had run on a mantra of  “compassionate conservativism” and “we can do better”*  It was just a single decision made by a court that makes lots of decisions each year. After making that decision, one might wonder the significance in history or that small event.

Bush became president. As a Republican, he bristled at Democrats, and specifically attempts by the Clinton administration, and its hold overs, telling him that terrorism should be his biggest priority. In the ensuing 8 months, for whatever reasons, it appears clear to the casual observer that Bush under-reacted to the threat of terrorism. As a result, after numerous warning from numerous officials and former officials, at nearly every level of government, 9/11 happened less than 9 months after Bush became president. That event triggered an American war in Afghanistan that cost thousands of lives and around a trillion dollars.

Then Bush like the nation into a war, invaded Iraq for absolutely no good reason (something that “democratic nations just don’t do).  That war cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, thousands of American lives, several trillion dollars, completely destabilized the politics of the Middle East, including inside Iraq, and spawned the rise of ISIS, a land based terrorist enterprise that lead to hundreds, perhaps thousands of cased of individual terror, deaths, rapes, beheadings, poverty and mass migration of peoples from Iraq and Syria into Europe, destabiizing, if only a bit (so far), Europe.

But came to power in 2001, during a minor deflationary recession (the first since the Great Depression) following a investment bubble in 1998 (the Dot Com bubble). Taken individually, but especially in combination, they all signaled clearly and strongly that the nation had arrived at supply side saturation – meaning supply side bias policies had lost their efficacy to positively affect the economy, increase production and move the economy forward. Deflation (or even lowflation) means that investors can’t get good ROI on their investments because their is insufficient demand in the aggregate. It was clearly time to shift back to demand-side economic policies. But what did Bush do?  He pored the coal on supply side policies. The combined affect of his policies moved well over $10 trillion from the 99% (demand side)  of the economy to the 1% (supply side) of the economy – in the course of a decade. He then covered his tracks with cheap & easy money (credit). The easy money triggered a housing bubble, triggering short term increase in demand borrowed from the future, creating faux growth in the economy. When the credit markets ran out, demand collapsed taking the finance market and the entire global economy with it. (The collapse, as measured by the congressional budget office,** equaled $1 trillion a year in demand, and therefore GDP, which is lock step equivalent to the $10 trillion shifted from demand to supply by Bush’s policies – meaning the disaster can be pegged directly to those policies Bush implemented)

Bush then walked away from the presidency leaving behind a smoldering wreck of a both the nation and the world, both in economic and security terms, creating an era of dystopia that is a long way from ending (“Heck of a job, Bushie” – to paraphrase himself), to take up the hobby of painting, one of which consisted of his toes sticking up out of the water at the other end of the bath tube. Quite the dichotomy. Meanwhile the disastrous effects of his presidency continue to unravel in a myriad of ways and we won’t know whether or not we survived his presidency for perhaps another 75 years….  And it all hinged on the outcome of Bush v. Gore.

On a personal level, as this was all playing out, I was working, perhaps the best job in my life (at least pay wise) and I wondered the consequences Bush v. Gore would have on my life. And I was wondering should I be pessimistic. I graduated into the steep Reagan recession of the early 1980s. I hustled my but to get out of that, but then I was laid off in the recession of 1991 and lost my entire savings over the course of a year. Once again I hustled my but to get out of that but it took a year.  Every time a republican was president, I had been without work. I was pretty aware that Bush Jr. was high bluster, low IQ person, arrogant jerk of a person, whom I had always feared might gain power over my life after I learned about him in 1991, but maybe his handlers would contain that. Anyway, I was sitting there at the highest pay and the most money I had ever had in my life. I was also enrolled at a tier 1 law school. So I can distinctly remember sitting there the day after the Bush v. Gore decision, at my cubical at work  wondering what would be the consequence of Bush, most importantly to me personally. Would the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision, and the Republican/Bush policies catch up to me before he left office? Weren’t my accumulated (and accumulating) credentials enough to keep me in the clear for 8 years (if necessary)? In short, no. The result, for me, by 2005, was horrible. Eleven years later, it is for me, horrible still. However, in the scheme of things, I am only a minor victim. Many others lost their lives. (Consider Pat Tillman, from Phoenix, playing Pro-Football in Phoenix, making millions of dollars, resigning from the NFL to enlist in the armed forces after 9/11 – I’m not sure what he was doing in December 2001 when the Supreme Court rendered their ruling, but he ended up losing millions, losing his life in Afghanistan. And the Bush administration merely burbing afterwards – the consumption of another victim in the pursuit of reckless selfish policies. Bush caused many innocent beings to lose their lives, but few lost as much as Tillman did. I’m still ticking, even if just barely).

(We can surmise that Gore would have continued the Clinton tradition of vigorous anti-terrorism investigation [which uncovered a plot to bomb Los Angeles new year celebrations at the turn of the millennium], which would have kept the United States from war in Afghanistan, that he would not have invaded Iraq, and that he MIGHT have switched to a demand side bias policy regime, and even if he did not, he would not have so recklessly have pursued supply side bias policies, to the tune of trillions of dollars vacating the demand side of the economy)

 

*This was the highly effective phrase Dick Cheney used in the Vice Presidential debate, to effectively shut down his opponent.

** http://goo.gl/8fpAGV

*** This serves as an opportunity to show just how tight, and tied to mechanics and mechanisms civics can be. Bush’s policies shoved the equivalent of more than $10 trillion dollars away from demand, into supply, over the course of a decade, or 10 years in time. The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the drop in demand was calculated by them to be over $1 trillion a year, nearly exactly equivalent to the extraction hoisted by Bush’s policies.  Approaching Civics from the stand point of “mechanisms in civics” is, I argue, EXTREMELY handy and powerful.