THE war criminal george w bush, known to some as shrub, opens his presidential library today. There will be the usual celebration and the speeches full of hypocrisy and revisionist history by the other four living Presidents lauding his "service" to the nation, but I hope he is visited by the ghost of the thousands of American men and women he sent to be slaughtered in his illegal and immoral war in Iraq, the ghost of the thousands of American men and women he failed to provide for and so who died in Afghanistan and by the ghost of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan children, women and men whose deaths he is responsible for. I expect a common theme of protest at this library will be the spilling of blood on the floor, I hope it happens often. From the Washington Post's Wonkbook, 24 graphs reviewing shrub's presidency.....
by Dylan Matthews on April 24, 2013 at 9:00 am
Good news for George W. Bush! His approval rating is the highest it’s
been in years, just as he’s set to open his presidential library at
Southern Methodist University. Forty-seven percent of Americans approve
of Bush, up from 33 percent when he left office as the economy cratered.
Bad news for George W. Bush! His newfound popularity comes, as my colleague Dan Balz
notes,
because of “the passage of time and Bush’s relative invisibility”
rather than any re-evaluation of his record. Majorities still oppose his
decision to invade Iraq and disapprove of his handling of the economy.
But in the interest of history, let’s take a trip down memory lane
and look at Bush’s record, issue by issue, and, of course, in charts.
1. Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terrorism.
Might as well start with the big one. In 2003, before the invasion,
Iraq was a brutal dictatorship suffering under a sanctions regime which,
according to UNICEF,
killed at least 500,000 children. How does it look in 2013? Well, it’s a dictatorship again, at least
according to Freedom House,
a highly respected arbiter of regime type. Freedom House rates 2013
Iraq as “not free,” giving it scores of 6 (out of 7, with 7 being as
unfree as is possible) on both political rights and civil liberties. By
comparison, Russia also gets a 6 on political rights, and a 5 on civil
liberties, and many critics believe that Putin is running a dictatorial
regime at this point.
What explains this? I’ll leave it to Freedom House:
Iraq’s political rights rating declined from 5 to 6 due
to the concentration of power by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and
increasing pressure on the political opposition, as exemplified by the
arrest and death sentence in absentia of Vice President Tariq al
Hashimi, the country’s most senior Sunni Arab politician.
Maliki is obviously less brutal than Saddam Hussein, but still,
that’s not exactly the ideal result. As for Afghanistan, it’s a similar
story. Hamid Karzai is a step up from the Taliban but the country is
still “not free,” according to Freedom House:
To be fair to Bush, though, at the end of his tenure the country had
snuck into the “partly free” category according to Freedom House. It’s
slid back under President Obama.
And what did it cost to get there? Well, a lot of money, for one thing. The Cost of War project
puts
the economic tally of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at about $4
trillion – with a “t”. And if we don’t pay off the debt accumulated as a
consequence of going to war, the interest alone could add over $7
trillion more to that by 2053:
This isn’t all Bush, as Obama made the decision to continue the war
in Afghanistan. But Bush set in motion policies that wound up costing
about $4 trillion.
It’s also cost a lot of lives. The most accurate data we have are on U.S. military casualties: 6,648 service members have
died
in Iraq and Afghanistan to date, a large majority of the deaths
occurring under Bush’s presidency. Civilian casualties are harder to
count. The UN mission in Afghanistan
estimates
that 14,728 civilians died there between 2007 and 2012. That, of
course, does not include casualties of the invasion and occupation
between 2001 and 2006.
Iraq is even harder to track. Iraq Body Count, an NGO devoted to tallying deaths in that war,
puts the number at between 112,114 and 122,644. The real number could be much higher. The World Health Organization
published a study in the
New England Journal of Medicine putting the death toll between 2003 and 2006 at 151,000. The medical journal
Lancet published a
study in 2006
estimating
that around 655,000 had died. That survey in particular was very
controversial, but regardless of whether upwards of 600,000, or “only”
over 100,000, have died, the war has killed a whole lot of people.
And of course, this leaves out harder to quantify costs. The U.S.
tortured people in the course of all three wars. We
flew people to secret prisons
and brutally interrogated them, including by using methods that most
people would classify as torture. It’s hard to put a number on that, but
it’s a real moral cost.
What about the wars’ benefits? Well, it’s hard to say, and harder to
quantify. Did the war in Afghanistan reduce terrorist attacks on the
United States and related targets? Terrorism as a phenomenon is so
extraordinarily rare
that it’s quite possible it didn’t, and that’s before taking into
account potential recruitment effects due to the invasion, which could
have made the overall effect positive.
This is a problem for counterterrorism policy more generally.
Criminologists Cynthia Lum, Leslie Kennedy, and Alison Shirley did a
critical review
of the literature in 2008 and found no evidence that any widely used
counterterrorism practice actually reduces the incidence of terrorist
attacks. Twelve studies found that metal detectors and security
screening worked, for instance, but another 13 found they were actually
harmful to counterterrorism efforts. All 11 studies on military strikes
either found no effect or that the strikes backfired. “Perhaps what is
equally (if not more) interesting is what we
didn’t find from
our review,” they write. “Most interventions have never been evaluated,
which speaks to the lack of an evidence base for counter-terrorism
policy.”
That counts for Obama too, but it underscores a key problem with the
war on terrorism, including as it was conducted by Bush: it never relied
on evidence-based practices to address the problem at hand.
As for Iraq, it is, again, tough to draw conclusions. The country has
liberalized considerably, to be sure, but all counterproliferation and
counterterrorism benefits touted pre-invasion weren’t forthcoming.
Indeed, according to Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, the war actually
ended up
increasing worldwide terrorism sevenfold, due to copycat attacks and recruitment effects.
2. The economy.
Overall, the economy under Bush (and Alan Greenspan, and Ben
Bernanke) was pretty much all right. Unemployment was low, though not
sub-4 percent, as it was under President Clinton:
And while growth was under the 4-5 percent rates it was averaging during the 1990s, it was hardly bad:
Median compensation (or, wages plus benefits)
stagnated after growing under Clinton. The bottom three lines are all real average hourly compensation.
Indeed, the Hamilton Project’s Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney
find that median annual earnings for men actually fell under Bush, after rising under Clinton.
Inequality actually rose more slowly under Bush than it did under Clinton:
Poverty increased, after having fallen under Clinton:
Extreme poverty continued the upward trajectory it’s been on
ever since welfare reform:
But then 2008 happened. While almost all of the Great Recession has
taken place under Obama’s presidency, the groundwork was laid during
George W. Bush’s, and the crisis started in his final year.
Take, for instance, housing prices. One root cause of the financial
crisis was the continued overvaluation of housing stock in the United
States. That really
took off when Bush was in office, though it began under Clinton:
Interestingly, though, the share of the economy devoted to finance
didn’t grow a lot while Bush was president. “Finance and insurance,” in
particular, was only 8.2 percent of the economy when Bush took office,
and never went above that. The main growth was under Clinton:
The most obvious case for Bush’s culpability in the crisis is
negligence, that he — or his appointees — should have noticed the
housing bubble forming, or the dangers of unregulated securities, and
acted to stop them. But Bush was also an active deregulator, as his
Securities and Exchange Commission
exempted
large investment banks from limits on their debt-to-equity ratios in
2004, following a lobbying push by, among others, future Bush Treasury
Secretary and then Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson.
That led to a
sharp increase in the debt-to-equity ratio, or the share of bank assets that are borrowed from somewhere. Many analysts
believe
high debt-to-equity ratios are the defining danger that caused the
crisis, as it increased the damage that certain loans going bad could do
to banks. Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, for example,
argue
that ratios more like 2 to 1 mean that events like those in 2008 would
have just challenged banks rather than sinking them outright.
All the same, Bush’s initial response to the crisis was better than
some imaginable alternatives, though one could find fault with his
administration’s failure to bail out Lehman Brothers, which arguably
precipitated the crisis outbreak. He worked with Nancy Pelosi to craft a
fiscal stimulus package in early 2008, which some researchers
concluded
increased consumer spending by an average of 3.5 percent. And, of
course, Bush and his Treasury secretary Hank Paulson devised the bank
bailout package which Alan Blinder and many others
credit with preventing an actual depression.
In any case, it’s
left us with a lot of debt.
Even if you don’t blame the crisis on Bush, at least half the debt is
directly attributable to his policy choices. Racking up debt isn’t
necessarily a bad thing, and some have even
argued that surpluses can be economically dangerous, but for whatever it’s worth, Bush played a big role there:
It’s also worth noting that Bush was increasing the deficit at a time
when the economy was expanding — which is exactly the opposite of what
Keynesians believe makes sense, and which also made it more difficult
for the country to respond to the recession.
3. Taxes
Another enduring legacy of the Bush administration is the creation of
the current tax structure. With the exception of some minor changes for
earners making above $400,000, or $200,000 if you include changes to
some tax deductions, the tax code is roughly as it was after Bush’s
second tax cut in 2003. That means a lot less revenue:
Even at its highest point, revenue under Bush was a full percentage
point of GDP below where it was in 2001. That means billions of dollars
in annual lost revenue. If, in 2009, the government had taken in as much
revenue as a percent of GDP as it had in 2001, it would have gotten
about $600 billion more.
What about distribution? Well, let’s take a look at the Tax Policy Center’s
distributive breakdown of Senate Republicans’ proposal late last year to extend the tax cuts, relative to letting them expire totally:
Millionaires would have gotten an 8.1 percent tax cut, while those
making under $10,000 got an average tax cut of $4. Of course, everyone
making under $200,000, and most making between $200,000 and $400,000,
got this exact deal. The public perception is correct: the Bush tax cuts
were heavily tilted to benefit wealthier taxpayers.
4. Health care
Under Bush, insurance premiums as paid both by workers and their employers roughly doubled, as you can see in this
Kaiser Family Foundation chart:
And according to
KFF, the percentage of firms offering health benefits fell from 68 percent to 59 percent during his tenure.
But Bush did inaugurate Medicare Part D, which has provided
prescription drug coverage to 73 percent of Medicare recipients. As this
Kaiser chart shows, the program came in way cheaper than expected:
Then again, that’s largely because prescription drug prices have fallen due to
lackluster pharmaceutical innovation.
5. Education
Bush’s crowning accomplishment in this regard is No Child Left
Behind, which established testing standards for all elementary and
secondary schools for the first time ever. However, its implementation
was been somewhat shaky, with many local districts recoiling against its
mandates. One frequent cause of grievance is that, as this New America
Foundation
chart explains, the Bush administration repeatedly signed budgets that provided less than the authorized funding levels for NCLB:
Whether or not that money would have actually helped student
achievement is, of course, another question. So what happened to student
achievement? On math, it rose.FFourth grade math scores, for example,
rose for students of all races:
But for reading, the results were less impressive. Here’s fourth grade again, by race:
Some progress, but not of the same scale you see with math.
6. Environment
The Bush administration was pretty hostile to most efforts to combat climate change, between
withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to
needing to be sued for the EPA to do anything to combat it. As a consequence, greenhouse gas emissions
continued to rise (
update: before falling in 2008/2009, as Brad points out to me):
As did the
sea level:
And
U.S. temperatures:
The overall trend is still troubling, and even if year-to-year
temperatures didn’t rise, they’re still higher than they’ve ever been.
It’s really really bad, you guys.
7. HIV/AIDS
Map source: PEPFAR Worldwide Activities Map.
One bright spot on Bush’s record is the President’s Emergency Plan
for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program to fight HIV/AIDS in the developing
world by, among other things, distributing anti-retroviral drugs,
preventing transmission from mothers to children, and preventing initial
infection through abstinence and condom programs. It worked. One study
found that the program saved 1.2 million peoples’ lives, and reduced HIV-related mortality by about 10 percent. It
directly supports 5.1 million peoples’ antiretroviral drug regimens.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/george-w-bushs-presidency-in-24-charts/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&wpisrc=nl_wonk
W. 
