It is hard to give a crook like Clinton anything but my anathema...however, lets see:
1. gasoline was around $1/gallon under Clinton
2. We actually won the military campaign in Bosnia with less than 100 American lives lost
3. The NASDAQ was at 3500 and projected to hit 5000; the Dow was soaring.
4. We had a balanced budget and a surplus!...
On the minus side we had Haiti, Somalia, USS Cole, corruption, pardons, Whitewater, Monica, Paula, Juanita, Kathleen, and countless other "embarrassments", and a lackadaisical approach to Islamic terrorism (the ONE place I'd give Bush a good mark). MY POINT: While Clinton isn't worthy so much to scrape the soles of Reagan shoes, Bush is good enough only to shine them!
Your points are misguided.
1) Gasoline was lower because Clinton was letting terrorists ans the governments that sposor them run amock. When Bush began to confront them, it affected prices. I will take the right to live without being blown up over gas prices anyday. If you are dead, the price of gas is not important.
2) Bosnia was primarily an air campaign against a government and its forces and not terrorists. You can not equate the two. Also, Bosnia was not sactioned by the UN and was done unilaterally, unlike President Bush having UN resolutions that authorized the war and a coalition of the willing.
3) The Nasdaq and the stock market were soaring under Clinton but that is because allot of large public companies, hundreds of them, were inflating their earnings on bogus information because the Clinton DOJ and his administration were not watching them responsibily. Truth be known, if investors knew the truth about the companies actual earnings, the Nasdaq and stock market would have been allot lower!
4) We had a balanced budget because of the republican congress. They had to drag Clinton to the table on this. We had a surplus because Clinton was scaling back on defense spending and gutting our military, which Bush has had to reverse.
Some of the reasons we have a deficit -
1) 911 cost of about 2 trillion dollars damage to our economy.
2) The bust of the tech industry.
3) The infalted earnings by hundreds of public and private companies.
4) And some runaway spending.
** By Bush cutting taxes, the deficit is allot lower because of tax revenues.
That was an instance where the president lied about the extent of "atrocities" being committed by the leader of a little pissant country who was no threat to anybody to justify a military action to remove him, right? Where are all those mass graves and the evidence of the massive "ethinc cleansing" that was going on. Oh, and the KAL folks that we went to assist by getting rid of Milosovic? A bunch of gun-running drug dealers and terrorists. Yeah, that was a really good military move by clinton.
As you can see from this chart, NASDAQ approached 5000, and then soared back down below 2500 in the final year of clinton's term as President. So the conditions that led to the downturn of the stock market developed on clinton's watch and Bush inherited those conditions. The market has rebounded from the scandals and downturn from the clinton administration's neglect and the effects of the terrorist attacks in 2001 and are back at approximately the same levels that they were when W took office.
The "balanced budget" and "surplus" were always on the horizon, never in the fiscal year budgeted. Even then, the so-called surplus was not really a surplus when you take into consideration the fact that excess SS receipts were being used to fund the current fiscal year.