I hope you're right, but we'll see. At any rate, it's still not good enough, especially considering the fact that we're not counting all our unfunded liabilities in the debt figure.
Debt/GDP is also bad metric because you should be using NNP in the denominator. GDP fails to subtract capital consumption and profits earned by foriegners in the US, both of which are significant.
We're in for a fiscal crisis in less than 10 years if we don't do something about both our debt and our unfunded liabilities, and Bush has been doing next to nothing with either.
In fact, Bush has worsened the problem with that disgusting medicare bill. Not that the Rats would do any better, mind you. If Kerry were president, I have no doubt he would have increased unfunded liabilities more the twice the amount Bush increased the national debt. But Bush's fiscal record is still awful.
profits earned by foreigners if repatriated to their home country are most certainly counted in GDP. If profits stay here, there is no difference between profits earned by foreigners and US citizens
He screwed up on Medicare, absolutely.
And the problem with "long term" effects of debt is that there are just too many economic variables long term: in the Clinton years, he raised taxes and got a boom . . . because the price of oil was VERY low; computers began to drive productivity up everywhere; and a vast new market opened in Eastern Europe. Clinton had nothing to do with any of that, but it certainly minimized the entire U.S. fiscal policy.