"It's almost a lost economic decade." -- Mark Zandi, co-founder of and chief economist at Moody's Economy.com

The Washington Post published a pretty good summary of the Bush economic record yesterday. It's worth the read if you didn't catch.

These two 'graphs pretty much sum it all up:

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.

Bush and his aides are quick to point out that they oversaw 52 straight months of job growth in the middle of this decade, and that the economy expanded at a steady clip from 2003 to 2007. But economists, including some former advisers to Bush, say it increasingly looks as if the nation's economic expansion was driven to a large degree by the interrelated booms in the housing market, consumer spending and financial markets. Those booms, which the Bush administration encouraged with the idea of an "ownership society," have proved unsustainable.

But these quotes also neatly describe up the past eight years:

Some of the recovery, some of the expansion, was based on very shaky foundations -- Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight.

It's sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom. -- Mark Zandi, co-founder of and chief economist at Moody's Economy.com

For a group that claims it wants to be judged by history, there is no evidence on the economic policy front that that was the view...It was all Band-Aids. -- Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former Congressional Budget Office chief and former Bush White House staffer

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