Paying the price

In 2007, Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote in Vanity Fair about the gloom to come and where the blame for it should be placed.

"When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page."

That was written before the burst of the housing bubble and the economic meltdown that in large part can be traced to the deregulation of financial markets. The Great Recession had not yet begun, but the writing was on the wall, and all the print was in red ink.

Stiglitz offered this analysis of the situation at the time: "... a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich, a national debt that will probably have grown by 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit ..."

George W. Bush came into office the beneficiary of Clinton administration economic policies that resulted in a federal budget surplus. After decades of deficit spending that began to balloon during the Reagan years, a centerpiece of the 2000 presidential campaign was the debate over how to spend an anticipated $2.2 trillion budget surplus.

Instead of retaining the policies that created that surplus, Bush — after losing the popular vote and taking office by virtue of a decision from a Supreme Court where conservatives held the majority — and a Republican Congress pushed through tax cuts that largely benefited the rich. According to Stiglitz, those with incomes of more than $1 million received a tax break more than 30 times larger than that received by the average American.

Instead of reducing the amount of money America owed, as he promised his approach would, Bush and his tax policies "directly added $2.5 trillion to the national debt in the full 10 years they have been law," according to the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP).

Now, the consequences of the Bush years are staring us in the face. The consequences of massive tax cuts for the rich. The consequences of launching two wars paid for with a credit card. The consequences of deregulating Wall Street.

As if that weren't enough, instead of allowing those Bush-era tax cuts to expire for the nation's wealthiest, conservatives in Congress were able use the threat of ending unemployment benefits to the long-term jobless to successfully blackmail President Barack Obama into agreeing to let the wealthy continue to wallow in their spoils for at least two more years.

The cost of extending those tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans over the next two years is $80 billion, according to CAP.

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