The Myth of the Bull Elephant

Oh this is too good to pass up. Come to think of it, Clinton didn't damage my 401k either. :ponder:

The Myth of the Bull Elephant
by DarkSyde
Mon Oct 23, 2006 at 02:52:43 AM PDT

It's become a Republican led mantra lately, too often repeated by a mindless traditional media with the attention span of a toddler gulping down Mountain Dew and suffering from advanced ADD: "The economy is doing great, the stock market is at an ALL TIME high!!!!"

I'm sure those of you reading this who have a vast equity portfolio (All twenty of you) as well as those who've been saddled with brain trauma so severe they cannot do simple math or recall the last decade--basically anyone who still thinks Bush is doing a great job--are thrilled with this recent earth shattering market rally. For the rest of us, here's a short stroll down memory lane with the benefit of a little arithmetic even Jethro Clampett could handle.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was bouncing around 11,000 in the year 2000. Last week's close was 12,002. So, based on those numbers, after swiping trillions of taxpayer dollars -- borrowed from you and your children--and tossing it into the gaping bottomless maw of Wall Street's elite like so much papery green chum, the return on the DJIA during CEO Mastermind George Bush's reign weighs in at a whopping ~ 1.5% a year or so. In between it took a steep dip resembling a certain mountain pass in Tora Bora and has regained just barely enough to rival the interest my credit union pays on a checking account. Goodness gracious, where will we spend it all?

And for you tech investors, the NASDAQ Composite Index hit a high of about 5000 in March of 2000. It ended the week at 2342. Good grief, you'd have done considerably better if you had sealed the cash in a tin can and buried it in your yard for the last six years. Were the NASDAQ COMP a conscious entity in need of immediate medical attention, it might just give up at this point and opt for a mercy killing, lest the poor thing suffer another agonizing botched operation under the inept knife wielding hands of Doc Bush and Nurse Cheney.

Now, it would be irresponsible to the point of deception to attribute market performance solely to a President. But if the GOP is dumb enough to try and play that game, it's perfectly fair to clock the living shit out of them by pointing out that under mean old, 'librul,' tax and spend, philandering Democrat Bill Clinton, the markets turned in healthy double digit gains year after year.

Short version: Clinton didn't exactly hurt my 401-K.

And if the Republican shill du jour is so fucking stupid that they stubbornly press the point, lets just say that for those of us in the Reality Based Community, based on the performance of the market and the economy in Clinton Vs Bush, if they're going to seriously try and extrapolate that dynamic in to the future, the choice this November and beyond could well boil down to being able to afford to send our kids to college while enjoying a reasonably secure retirement in peace and prosperity, or sending our kids off to fight and die in endless, pointless wars on behalf of Halliburton's next quarterly earnings report, while subsisting in grinding poverty.

Elections have do indeed consequences. But don't despair baby boomers, when Bush again works to destroy your social security, and Johnny comes limping home hooray, hooray: burger joints are always hiring retirees, and the war disabled too. ... You want fries with that?