With the administration’s foreign policy in shambles, Bush and Cheney are doing their best to shift attention to the domestic front, trying to convince the public that that their stewardship of the economy has been great. For instance, Cheney told a California audience this week, “Our economy is strong and growing stronger. The Bush tax cuts are working.”
The carefully-chosen partisan crowd applauded the remark, but one wonders if even Bush’s most ardent fans actually believe such statements.
Workers’ hourly wages are not keeping pace with inflation, consumer spending is off, and order for durable goods is failing to meet expectations.
Worst of all, the overall economy is slowing considerably.
The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of just 3 percent in the spring, a dramatic slowdown from the rapid pace of the past year, as consumer spending fell to the weakest rate since the slowdown of 2001, the government reported Friday.
The Commerce Department said that the gross domestic product, the country’s total output of goods and services, slowed sharply in the April-June quarter from a 4.5 percent growth rate in the first three months of the year.
The size of the slowdown caught economists by surprise. Many had been looking for GDP growth to come in around 3.8 percent in the second quarter. Even that would have been a sharp deceleration for an economy that had been growing at a 5.4 percent annual rate through the year ending in March.
But don’t worry, Cheney is absolutely certain that Bush’s tax policies are “working.” Sure they are, Dick; sure they are.