Listening to all this talk of "swing voters" and "battleground states," I often think about my dear ol' daddy, W.F. "Hi" Hightower. When I was growing up in Denison, Texas, my father didn't expound much on political philosophy, but if you backed him into a corner he'd have called himself a conservative. Probe a little deeper, however, and ol' Hi would maintain that the community had a moral obligation to look out for the least among them, that a public library was essential in creating an informed citizenry (even though it would cut into his newsstand business), that we needed to pay a small tax to the county if we expected to have good roads, and that any leader— whether in business or government— had to be accountable for his (or her, but mostly his) actions. And if he proved himself incompetent or dishonest, or both, he should be hoisted out of office on his own petard.
I got to thinking about this election, which everybody says is the most important in recent history— wondering what Hi would make of George W and the Bushites; First, he'd have to break out his hipwaders to slog through the rhetorical muck spewing from the podiums of these high-dollar conventions, with their Hollywood production and vetted and canned stump speeches.
But then, being a businessman, Hi would've wanted to see the hard, objective numbers and make his decision on solid, logical deduction rather than on the cut of a man's hair or his choice of hobbies. Like Joe DiMaggio's 56- game hitting streak, like Hank Aaron's 755 dingers, the numbers don't lie.
So even though my daddy's long gone, I wanted to put together this special Lowdown with him in mind—he'd be all for boiling the President down to a job performance review.
The Economy
Federal deficit under Bush administration: $2.3 trillion projected through 2011
Federal surplus when Bush came into office: $5.6 trillion projected over 10 years
2004 deficit: $450 billion
Current U.S. debt to the penny: $7,298,671,067,464.27
"Our projected budget deficits are not manageable without significant changes [in taxes or spending]...We simply cannot grow our way out this problem." Says U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, a former Reagan Administration official, who is a non-partisan auditor appointed to a 15-year term.
Source: Congressional Budget Office
Wages
Americans' average income growth from 2000-2002: -5.7%
Americans' average income growth from 2000-2002 adjusted for inflation: -9.2%
2002 is the most recent year for which data is available. This is the first time Americans' overall income shrank for two consecutive years since the current tax system was put in place during World War II.
Source: Internal Revenue Service
Hourly wage growth for production, non-supervisory workers in 2003: 0.6% (the 80% of the workforce that are blue-collar workers in manufacturing or are non-managers in services)
CEO pay growth in 2003: 27%
Hourly wages fell for middle- and low-wage men and women (adjusted for inflation), making 2003 the worst year for wage growth over the 1998-2003 period. ... [ read more ]
Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
Their names probably won't mean mean anything to you, but these people ought to have some modicum of personal recognition: Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale "Bubba" Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto, and Adam Weise. These are the 11 workers who were killed when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.
