In the Realm of the Dying Dollar

Bush has been an unmitigated disaster to our core economy. He created a monstorously huge deficit and then declared that he cut a problem of his own creation in half. LOL. Only a Republican could believe that that is progress. Who will pay for Bush's $9 Trillion debt? Our grandchildren! It is a shame that we are passing on our problems to them. As for the recession that Bush inherited, the recession occurred in March 2001 (when Bush was president). They unspoken issue here is that the economy is booming for two reasons, the massive deficit spending by this administration and the massive war spending in Iraq. Whoever is left to deal with the mess will be confronted with a recession.

I have to laugh when every decade or so I have to read about how America is in economic decline and everybody is going to eat our lunch! Bush inherited an economy moving into recession due to the dot com crash, and then on top of that the 9/11 attacks put the economy into a free fall. His actions to cut taxes, combined with the policies of the Fed to lower interest rates worked wonders and we have since had a booming economy creating millions of new jobs with low inflation and strong GDPgrowth. Every sector of the economy has done well, and income, after inflation, is now in excess of 4%. As he promised to do, Bush has more than halfed our budget deficit to about 1.5%, and it is much smaller than the deficits run by most of the European countries of which Hirsh is so enamored. The decrease in tha value of the dollar , which has Hirsh so worried, also has many upsides as well, one of which is to shrink our trade deficit, which in turn will lead to a strengthing dollar. The dollar, like all other aspects of the economy moves in cycles. The day will come when we are all complaining that the dollar is too strong. All I can say is that Herbert Hoover could only have dreamed of residing over an economy as good as the one we have had the past 7 years or so. I think tha most important point that Hirsh makes about immigration to the U.S. is his only accurate comment. People from all over the world want to come to America, because there is no other country in the world that creates economic opportunity and freedom as America does, and as long as we keep attracting the best and the brightest and the world's risk takers, we will continue to be the world's economic super power. If we were the basket case that Hirsh seems to believe, nobody would want to come here and be paid in U.S. dollars. So Micheal Hirsh get a life, and pray that we don't elect a Democrat President, who will raise taxes and increase spending, for those actions will quickly remind all Americans what a truely recessionary economy really looks and feels like.

Clearly the author has never heard of Ron Paul. He has spoken of the danger of the dollar's decline in virtually every stump speech he has given since January. Note to Newsweek - there is more to presidential politics than Rudy, Hillary and Obama.

Mike is right. The U.S. will regain its diplomatic footing starting next year -- all the presidential candidates of both parties grasp that Bush's bellicosity has damaged America's ability to influence issues it cares about. But the U.S. economy rests entirely on the purchase of U.S. debt by countries like China that as Mike describes is already fed up with the tumbling value of its dollar investments, and is starting to balance its portfolio with Euros. The U.S. has a reckoning coming, and must attack this economic erosion.

Steve LeVine, author
The Oil and the Glory (Random House)
http://www.oilandglory.com