Althought the push is to identify the economic situation in which the US finds itself as the responsibility of the Bush administration alone, when you look at these graphs its obvious that the underlying problem began much earlier during the Clinton adminstration.

And if that's the case, it seems that the two great "victories" of the Clinton administration: 1)The expansion of trade without the adoption of trade rules similiar to what the EU has in the  acquis communitaire, and 2) the destruction of the social safety net, i.e. welfare to work, deregulation,etc appear to have laid the foundations of utter economic disaster 10-15 years on.

It almost seems to suggest that the Clinton "miracle" consisted almost entirely of borrowing from the past savings and getting loans from foreign powers.  Needless to say I'm not impressed with what Clinton did, but the bigger problem is that the current thinking in the US is that happy days will be here again if we ditch Bush.  The problem with that being, that it does nothing to confront the underlying unsustainability of the current economic model.  And the same people who pushed bad neo-lib policy during the Clinton administration are now advising the two front runners in the Democratic primary.

And people are more interested in talking about the novelty of having a woman or a black man as president than looking past the bullshit about that being change to realized that the race or gender of a nation's leader has zero effect on working people's lives unless there's a fundamental shift in economic thinking in the country.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg