[Aurel]

Tabs,

Your synthesis started really nicely, and you can be credited the ability to see and understand both points of view. Somewhere though, it stills looks like a work in progress, and the conlusions have not been reached yet. It is always more difficult to reach conlusions when we take a honnest look at things than we use a biased vision, Isn`t it ?

Economic analysis in itself is not easy, because on one hand, one could see a very strongly recovering economy with a fastly growing GDP. Another vision could see a system on the verge of collapse, with an artificially inflated GDP that does not create jobs, and only reflects money changing hands on the stock market...

I am almost done reading Paul O`Neils book. I think the guy had a genuine talent for fixing things on the long run. He had many good suggestions for Bush, on how to fix the social security retirement pension system, on how to avoid more corporate scandals like Enron and reteach corporate ethics to CEOs...

Problem is, Bush never read his memos.
When he found out about it, O`Neil started writing short memos of 3 pages...but still, Bush seemed to have difficulty reading them. His big issue was opposing Bush`s taxcut, which seemed to him like a short term fix at best. Then, the conditions changed, the spendings increased, and Bush still would not reconsider his taxcut. His main argument was: `I promised it, and I will never negociate with myslef`. Now, the question of whether or not his taxcut really helped the economy is an entirely political debate in itself...maybe an answer could be: yes, the taxcuts helped an economy that does not create jobs and only makes stock holders richer...

Aurel