Blame Congress, not presidents

Thank you, Howard Miller, for “Bush’s tax breaks caused this rift” (Fence Post, Dec. 3) and to the Daily Herald staff. I wonder if the Miller letter was purposely placed next to the cartoon of Santa Obama “stimulating” the fireplace with our tax dollars or not, but both the letter and the cartoon provided me a good laugh.

It is interesting that Mr. Miller had to go back to a January 2009 WSJ article on Bush’s job creation record when the unemployment rate stood at 7.8 percent. If the job market has in fact improved so much under the current POTUS then please let me go back to March of 2009 when the current administration promised us that with almost $1 trillion of stimulus money the unemployment rate would not go above 8 percent.

We peaked in October of 2009 at 10.1 percent and have for the most part suffered through the last two years at more than 9 percent unemployed. So much for job creation theory under Mr. Miller and President Obama.

In candor, I really don’t think either president is to blame for the unemployment figures as world events like 9/11, campaign on terror, housing collapse, the Euro, etc., trump what any president can realistically do, but I still chuckle when some still want to go back and blame Bush three years later.

If anyone is to blame, I would look at Congress. It caused many of the spending issues we have today and can easily be blamed for the collapse in housing as it forced banks to make the subprime loans in the first place.

One final comment to Mr. Miller: The Democrats controlled Congress from January 2007 to January 2011. I think one can make a better argument that the Democrats in Congress did more to take unemployment from 4 percent to 10 percent than anything Presidents Bush or Obama have done.

Rick Pauer

St. Charles