Note to self: Don’t ask President Obama to grade himself on his job performance.

Last week the president was asked in an interview to grade his performance on “fixing” the economy. Acknowledging the argument that he inherited the economic recession from George W. Bush, Obama gave himself an “Incomplete” for not finishing the job he feels still needs to be done to fix the economy. That’s because Bush is still to blame for the entire economic situation we’re in nearly four years after he left office. Right?

Apparently it is, given President Obama’s references in his convention address to the past decade as one of “decline” and bad economic policies, normally meaning the tax cuts signed into law by President Bush.

Not that the past 10 years haven’t actually been bad. We had a recession that began under President Bush, no doubt, but it becomes interesting for Obama to push for raising taxes when the Bush tax policy is still in effect. I’ll explain why I say this in a bit.

Another feature of the Democratic National Convention last week was the use of President Bill Clinton to endorse Obama as the best choice to improve our economy since the economy is arguably far from recovering. Need proof? Take a look at the August jobs report that was released the day after his convention address.

Although approximately 96,000 new jobs were created, dropping the unemployment rate from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent, the labor participation rate has fallen to 63.5 percent. According to a CNBC.com article, that means the workforce lost 368,000 participants, leaving the labor participation rate at its worst level in “more than 30 years.”

Of course, to democrats, the economic good years of the 1980s are matched and surpassed by the vaunted “Clinton boom” of the 1990s. Hence the keynote speech by Clinton himself, I suppose.

An interesting feature of the so-called Clinton boom, however, was how much economic growth took place and when.

In 1993 President Clinton passed a tax hike through a Democrat-controlled Congress, and is what democrats tend to refer to when they say the economy did not suffer from a tax hike. Relatively speaking, this is only half true.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the economy grew between 1993 and 1997, but at a rate of 3.3 percent per year while wages remained stagnant. After a republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and reelection of Clinton in 1996, the president signed a republican-supported tax cut that increased wages and grew the economy by 4.4 percent for the four years following 1997.

While certain economic circumstances are vastly different today, economic growth has been far lower since 2009, having its best rate of growth in 2010 of 3 percent, which brings me back to my comment on the Bush tax cuts.

The Bush years aside, the tax cuts he signed into law are the current tax policy, and President Obama and Congress have not altered them for Obama’s entire term. Obama has stated he wants to only raise taxes for the “wealthy,” as he calls them. But the important factor of the Clinton tax policies that created more extensive economic growth was, you guessed it, their relative friendliness toward the “wealthy” and the economy’s business elements needed to create jobs.

Greg Sainer is a senior communication studies major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].