Spiderman's right. In fact, government in general has very little to do with the economy. If you look at the stock market, it actually has a very predictable trend - about 5 strong years followed by 5 weak years - and if you track it over a long period, it resembles a sinusoidal wave that moves gradually up. The government's responisibility is simply to track the direction of the rise or fall and minimize its effect. They don't want the economy to rise or fall too rapidly. Quick rises tend to lead to quick drops, so stability is the key. During the late Reagan years, the economy was in a natural upswing, so he looked like a good president. Shortly after he left office, it started its downward trend, which Bush took the heat for. A few years after Clinton left office, it began another swing up and he actually made a mistake, I believe, by letting it rise too quickly (in large part from the .com boom, which I don't think any economists really knew how to handle), which inevitably lead to the massive hit immediately after Bush W took office (and, in fact, started while Clinton was still pres.) However, I think W made a mistake by cutting taxes at the same time as that economic hit, which led to a further decline and then 9/11 sent it spinning even further down. Now it's five years later and the economy's starting to rise again, which would be a much more opportune time for a tax cut, since people are more willing to spend it.
Anyway, my point is that the economy is going to go wherever it wants to go and politicians have very little impact on that.
What politicians do have an impact on is how the federal government makes and spends money. They make money through taxes and spend it on government programs, such as education, welfare, defense, social security. My biggest problem with the current government (from 2000-2006) was that they were completely irresponsible, always spending more money than they were making, leading to record deficits and a much larger national debt than we had in 2000 (currently at $8.5 trillion). So where is all this money coming from? Mostly from China. Think about that. Our government currently owes China, a communist republic, trillions of dollars. It's almost as though we have a mortgage on our government to China. They own our country, but we just get to use it. And that scares me a lot. Because at any time, they can stop lending us money or use that as leverage in an international conflict. So we can either start paying that money back or use it to beef up our military and then invade them. Personally, I'd prefer to pay the money back.
So how does that relate to responsibility? Whenever the same party controls the White House and Congress, it seems like there is absolutely no accountability when it comes to spending. Whatever the president wants to do, congress lets him do (because they need to act like they support him) and money gets spend like crazy, without the tax revenue to support it. Only when we have separate party control (such as Clinton with a republican congress or Reagan with a democratic congress) are there any limitations on executive power and a chance to balance the federal budget. And only by balancing the budget do we have a chance to repay our country's debt.
However, I'm pretty jaded, in general, by our current political system in this country. Politicians today spend more time and money trying to get re-elected than they do actually serving the country. It's almost like that's their job now - to get re-elected - and that's where they put their effort. Literally billions of dollars are wasted every year because politicians vote to spend money on pork-barrel projects in order to support campaign contributors who will help them win the next election. It really pisses me off, both parties do it and it's unlikely to change any time soon.
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