In p8triot's introduction thread, RidinHighSpeeds made a post (New boot, Again.) stating that Bush's tax cuts fixed Clinton's recession. My opinion on the matter is quite different, so I thought I'd throw my views into the ring.

The recession that occurred during Bush's early presidency was neither Bill Clinton's fault, nor George W. Bush's fault. It is true that one had higher taxes, while the other had low taxes, but taxes simply don't have a huge effect on the economy.

If taxes were the cause of our recession, our economy would have gone downhill during Clinton's administration, when taxes were high and people had less spendable income. Almost as soon as Bush took office, he cut taxes, and almost as soon as he took office, the recession began. People suddenly had to pay less taxes, but our economy still sank. One would think the opposite to be true, but it wasn't. This is because taxes were not the cause of the recession.

So what was the cause of the recession? The Y2K bug, of course. You guys remember the Y2K bug, right? It was that famous problem in 1998-1999 when corporations realized that their computer systems would not correctly handle the date change from 1999 to 2000 because the systems only stored a two-digit year.

To correct this problem, corporations hired massive numbers of programmers to fix their applications, creating a lot of new jobs and providing an economic boost during 1998 and 1999. It is estimated that $300 billion dollars were spent fixing the Y2K bugs.

After the year 2000, these extra programmers became unnecessary, and corporations slowy began to lay off all of them, creating a huge group of unemployed programmers.

Furthermore, because the computer programming industry was so hot in the late 1990's, many people, including myself, had gone to school to study computer programming and were left unable to find a job in a saturated market.

Furthermore, during the late 1990's, technological advances were allowing more jobs to be oursourced to save money. However, because of the Y2K scare, technology was not seen as reliable, and companies were afraid to outsource. After the year 2000, the outsourcing which would have happened in the late 1990's was performed in the early 2000's, leading to a large group of people being laid off due to outsourcing.

These large groups of umemployed people created a ripple effect on our economy. Unemployed people can't afford to buy much, which hurts businesses. Unemployed people don't pay as much in taxes, which hurts funding for government programs. Employed people who have to take care of their unemployed family members can't afford to buy many luxuries, which hurts some businesses. As business sales slowed, more and more people had to be laid off.

There you have it. Recession.

Okay, so I don't totally blame the Y2K bug. I'm sure it had help: for example, the World Trade Centers collapsing made things worse.

But the tax policy of our presidents did not cause the recession; that's always been an irrational claim made by politicans who want to get elected or are too blind to look beyond economic taxation theory.

Bush hoped his tax cuts could prevent the depression. They didn't. Then he hoped more tax cuts would cure the depression. They didn't. The recession ended a couple years after conservatives predicted it would.

Why were they wrong? Because cutting taxes does not address the root cause of the problem. The root cause of the recession was economic factors like the Y2K bug, and the recession would continue until the people that bug affected could find new jobs.

But don't get me wrong: Bush's tax cuts probably helped make the depression a little less severe, and they probably helped end it a little sooner. Good job, Mr. Bush. However, I am not without my criticism of his actions:

First, Bush should have cut taxes on the lower class a lot more than he did. The vast majority of his tax cuts went to the upper class. The idea behind his tax cuts is that they'd allow businesses and business owners to be able to afford to hire more people. But that's only half of the equation: the consumers need to have enough money to buy new products, otherwise the demand for new products will be too low for corporations to want to hire new employees.

Second, if you're cutting taxes, you should generally cut spending to accomodate these tax cuts. Instead Bush increased spending, and few of his spending increases were directed at improving our economy. For example, he increased spending on Medicaid and Medicare during the recession, and he went to war twice. Had Bush spent less money, he might have been able to cut taxes even more, direct more money into our economy, and prevent the swelling of our national debt to some extent.

Third, Bush should not have made his tax cuts permanent. Our taxes should be cut in times of recession, but increased in times of prosperity in order to reduce our enormous national debt. Bush seems to want low taxes all of the time, and considering our national debt, that is bad policy. If Bush realized that the root cause of our depression was not high taxes, he might not be so deadset against increasing them again.

Finally, there may be a couple of presidents who made our depression worse than it needed to be: Bush Sr. and Reagan. These two presidents increased our national debt tremendously, and when you increase debt, future governments must pay for it.

Had our national debt been lower during the depression, Bush again might have been able to cut more taxes and put more money into our economy. We should count ourselves fortunate that Clinton reduced our debt, instead of continuing with the trend of spending money like crazy.