Remember When...

...about ten years ago, when the dot-com bust happened at the tail end of Clinton's second term in office?  Ol' George took office after the extremely contentious election fiasco with Gore.  And he implemented policies to stimulate the economy (among them, those super-evil tax cuts, as we often are reminded).  Then a short time later, 9/11 was a major economic disaster (at the worst possible time).

After 2001, though, things looked pretty good.  Actually, times were pretty good, for most of us.  We had to put up with about eight years of constant whining and complaining from the democrats, though.  It seemed like there was no end to the doom and gloom they could generate.  On many occasions, I heard lefties saying "this is the worst economy we've seen since the depression" and "it's a jobless recovery" and so on.  "George Bush is the worst president in history" was a common one, too (but they never said exactly why).  Sound familiar?

It seemed to me, at the time (circa 2005) that the democrats were just unbearably eager to have an economic disaster to get them back in power;  It wasn't much of a leap to envision that they'd do anything they could have behind the scenes to cause one to happen.  They hated George Bush with such passion, that their rhetoric frequently became incoherent and illogical (Janeane Garofalo comes to mind).  And they kept telling us, day after day, things are terrible.  Awful.  Miserable.  But through it all, life seemed pretty good to me.

Fast forward to today.  Mirroring the dot-com bust Bush inherited from Clinton, Obama has inherited the housing and bank crash that occurred at the 11th hour of Bush's presidency.  Lots of gloom and doom.

What's strange?  Well, I keep hearing news stories that start off something like:  "Contrary to expectations, the ____ industry shrank by __ percent over a year ago.  Experts had predicted modest but positive growth over the same period..."  You know the type, wherein some economist or think-tank seems to express complete surprise that the "recovery" isn't going strong.  Excuse me, but does anyone out there actually see a recovery, for real?  It sure doesn't seem like it, to me.  For real.

Where the Bush years were marked by plentiful jobs, increasing salaries, and overall improvement in living standards -- today we see the opposite.  Jobs are scarce.  Credit is scarce.  Forclosures, layoffs, and food stamps abound.  The standard of living is declining, most will say.  Few expect a prosperous future right now;  many even think the best days our behind us.

So why are these *!@&!?$ experts so cheery and optimistic now?  They sure found it easy to seek doom and gloom over the Bush years, when we had it pretty good.  And now that things stink, they're suprised that they're not better?

Do you think they've got an agenda or something?

By the way, look at the symmetry we have:

• In the 90's:  Ridiculous amounts of money dumped into pointless dot-coms that could never become profitable.
• In the 00's:  Ridiculous amounts of money dumped into massively overpriced housing.
• In the 10's:  Ridiculous amounts of cash dumped practically everywhere, to a whole variety of places, in a desperate attempt to stimulate economic activity.

The only difference, really, is that today, not only are we out of money, so is our nanny-state.