Editor,
Ed Hickey wrote in the Whidbey News-Times May 1 that President Donald Trump deserves praise for what he describes as a prosperous economy, as though Trump rescued it from dire circumstances he alleges are brought on by Democratic administrations.
Maybe Mr. Hickey is too young to remember that it was Republican President Ronald Reagan who took our nation from being the world’s biggest lender to being the world’s biggest debtor in eight short years.
Then, there were the economic glory days when our national debt was all but obliterated. Guess what? It was during the Democratic Clinton administration.
Sure, Bill Clinton did a despicable thing, but what president since George Washington nearly cleared our national debt?
Beside that, he didn’t do different than Eisenhower did, and who didn’t “like Ike”?
Then along came the Republican Cheney-led George W. Bush administration, which did worse than Reagan did putting us back into the deepest economic hole of all time.
Worse, it was all to support a cockamamie war in Iraq that killed thousands of our men in uniform to say nothing about many more Iraqi civilians.
It incited more worldwide terrorism than we’ve known since WWII.
It also became a time when our government entities from counties to states to our federal treasury were either declaring bankruptcy or being on the brink of it. It’s when Indiana, in desperation, leased their bottleneck interstate turnpike to a foreign entity for 99 years.
Has Mr. Hickey forgotten the sordid mess we were in at Obama’s inauguration?
Even the most implacably ignorant were admitting it was the worse recession since the “great one” of the 1930s.
Fortunately there was the rescue that the odd named Democratic President Barack Obama managed. We’re still enjoying that recovery even if Trump is trying to take credit for it.
As for Mr. Hickey’s grumbling about the exorbitant cost of common citizen benefits, the reckless cost of the unwarranted Iraq war would fund more space exploration, Social Security, Medicare, homeless rescue, prison reform and citizen benefit programs than most of us could imagine for generations to come.
Al Williams
Oak Harbor
