1) You were right to put the youngun' in his place... there's no place for personal insults when discussing politics. With that said, I'm regularly accused of being godless liberal terrist' loving scum the moment I question why the U.S needs to maintain more than 700 military bases outside of it's own borders!
2) I would not go so far as to blame Bush for the current debacle.... in my opinion it has much more to do with the fact that the U.S went off the gold standard to hide the fact that Vietnam had broken the bank in 71. This was not theoretical.... in 1970 the British Ambassador showed up at gold window in the U.S and wanted to pull out 3 billion dollars in exchange (a LOT of money back then), which caused several central bankers to spew their morning coffee. The fact has been, since the fun in Vietnam the U.S had no choice BUT to go to fiat currency, which has worked so long as said currency remained the reserve currency of the world (used exclusively to buy and sell oil and held as IOU's for trade imbalances)
The problem with this system is that the REAL value of the currency vs it's actual value has been a topic of much debate and saddly a show of smoke and mirrors as the real economy... manufacturing, production, new products and services through R&D... has progressively shrunk to be replaced with the financialized economy over the last 40 years. Consequently, much of the financialized economy has been based on the fueling of bubbles, from technology to real estate, for which we can thank several U.S administrations on both sides of the aisle.
To offset the fall in actual production and wages vs inflation we married credit with the financialized economy so much of the supposed GDP is actually based on giant IOU's that will probably never be repaid.
Okay, so that's a mouthful that can be argued in many ways. What has Bush got to do with it?
While he didn't cause the problem, he exacerbated it heavily through some very reckless policies-
In short, he increased spending while decreasing his taxable revenues.....
He pushed through a 1.2 trillion tax cut. If that's all that he did, things wouldn't be so bad, and to be fair the tax cut did help to get us out of the post dot com bubble that burst in early 2000 and 2001.
But, he then turned around and spent a ridiculously massive sum of money on a couple of overseas wars which have had almost no benefit to the United States (they never did get the guy who was ultimately responsible for 9/11 and his organization is still intact and around today) To make matters worse, he didn't actually pay for the wars....since he couldn't because he decreased his revenues.... so he paid for them entirely on credit. In 2008 alone, his last year in office, total defence related spending reached just around 1 trillion dollars, with the total cost of the Iraq war reaching a projected 2-3 trillion once all is said and done. And all of that went on the biggest VISA bill in modern history (now over 10 trillion dollars)
The counter-argument has been that the percentage of military spending vs GDP was in line with past figures but that isn't true due to the fact that much of the GDP is again, based entirely on debt and credit, cue the smoke and mirrors show again.
So to sum it up, Bush started his 8 years with a not half-bad surplus environment, cut taxes massively then increased defence spending massively. furthermore, the Pentagon under his appointees (like Rumsfeld) pursued several weapons programs which have cost taxpayers ridiculous amounts of money but have very little operational value....other than enriching private defence contractors.... The missile shield is still mostly a dream- they can hit a missile travelling on a straight course most of the time yet the Russians already have missiles that can easily defeat this. The F-22 and F-35 strike fighter programs, for instance, are examples of weapons development programs based more on political cronyism and gaining points with contractors and Generals who like fancy tech than anything of actual value on today's battlefield.
In fact, of the ridiculous multi-billions spent on cutting edge defence technology in the last decade very few of the big ticket items that cost the most have had any practical impact, other than the UAV program and some of the innovations borne out of necessity, like automated radar guided counter battery fire when bases get shelled and so forth.
My apologies for going off on a tangent. In summary, Bush is not solely responsible for the economic problems of today but he did heavily exacerbate the situation through reckless economic policy based more on political ideology than the reality on the ground.
At a time when he should have been reducing defence spending on unnecessary programs of very little practical value, and at a time when he should have been heavily scrutinizing the gouging carried out by private defence contractors at every level of the food chain, he gladly put it all on credit while decreasing his actual revenue. If the U.S wants to instantly reduce some of it's expenditures and free up a little more cash? Perhaps closing some of the 767 military installations outside of U.S borders would be a start!
