The recession that rolled in on the 2000 election was suspiciously timed but still inevitable owing to the jobs no longer needed when the panic over Y2K disaster proved unfounded, let alone the overblown business potential of the internet. Neither was Greenspan’s warning of “irrational enthusiasm” over the booming stock market heeded; yet at the same time he and Clinton did nothing to force SEC to head-off the reckless investments that were equivalent to wild speculation on penny stocks. Further, the Federal Reserve was slow in reducing the cost of money in order to re-stimulate the declining economy, paving the way for Bush’s own “irrational enthusiasm” for tax cuts in the wrong sector.

Instead of all those telecommunication startups in the ‘90s, the nation should have been investing in more substantial infrastructures, such as fuel alternatives, modernizing factories, developing housing, railways and green belt urban development. What this implies is that laissez-faire capitalism does not meet the needs of a modern society: it is engaged in too much fluff and frills that emasculates a nation, rather than initiating a blueprint for a robust, substantive economy underpinned by the sweat and blood of real labor in lieu of far too many frivolous services.

Had Bush not wrecked the surplus and used it as capital incentives for national reconstruction, rather than relying on the whims of the affluent to invest haphazardly if at all, the nation, despite 9/11, would now have been an economy of endurance.

Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: October 5, 2004.

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