Bushonomics!

As President George W. Bush last year went a-hawking his "Magick Elixir for All Thy Ails" -- give federal money to the most affluent -- he toured the Midwest. In St. Louis, he stumped from the floor of a factory among stacks of boxes stamped "Made in China" -- so the President's advance team hung up a painting of stacks of boxes that read "Made in the USA", and for good measure plastered white tape over all of the "Made in China" labels.

That was an early signal of how Bushonomics was going to work: It would involve papering over problems and hoping they'd go away. (Much like papering "Mission Accomplished!" over Iraq was supposed to make that problem go away, too.)

Three months later, Bush took his snake oil sales pitch to Canton, Ohio, where from the floor of another factory -- a bearing-manufacturing plant headed by an enthusiastic Bush-Cheney supporter -- he told the workers his tax cuts were going to rejuvenate the economy.

And indeed, tax cuts could have rejuvenated the economy -- if given to low- and middle-income families, because they would have spent more money as a result, and everyone could have won. Instead, the tax cuts are all padding the portfolios and profits of our better-off Americans -- who no doubt welcome the extra money, but who aren't likely to take it as a spur to extra spending.

Which is one reason why, even though the President got unprecedented carte blanche to pour federal revenues back into the private sector, places like Ohio have continued to hemorrhage jobs -- Ohio has lost 200,000 jobs since Bush took office, most of them in manufacturing. (The good news is: If any of those jobs migrated to China, then when the Chinese imports arrive, the Bush team will be there to paste "Made in USA" over the packaging. Mission accomplished!)

And now the very plant where Bush made his tax-cut pitch is to be closed, and 1,300 employees sacked, in a blow expected to ripple through other businesses in the state.

Of course, not everyone is taking this blow on the chin. As the democratic advocacy group Move On observes in its excellent on-line newspaper about the Bush Administration, The Daily Mislead, "one person who will not be feeling the pain of the President's economic policies is W.R. 'Tim' Timken -- a top Bush fundraiser and the man who decided to shut down the factory. Having earned more than $2.6 million last year, Timken stands to receive $59,000 in new tax breaks from President Bush this year ... By contrast, 89 percent of Ohio residents will receive less than $100 by 2006 from the latest Bush tax cuts."

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