Closing the Books on an Economic Disaster

by billmon

Fri Jan 09, 2009 at 02:55:27 PM PST

While we can't total up the damage from the current recession or even the current financial crisis, since both are still ongoing, with the release of December's unemployment numbers we can at least start to draw a line under the Bush presidency -- to the American economy what Hurricane Katrina was to New Orleans, or Doug Feith's Pentagon was to Iraq.

Since December marked the last full month of Bush's maladministration, we now have a reasonably full record of presidential job creation -- or, in his case -- job decimation -- to examine. (My past practice has been to add the final January of a term to the outgoing president's economic record, but closing the books now can't be called unfair to Shrub, since the economy is likely to cough up as many jobs this month as it did in December, if not more.)