A few weeks ago we reported that former Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan is the new financial columnist for Playboy Magazine. It wasn’t immediately clear how McKagan, who has a degree from the Albers School of Business at Seattle University, would use his column to educate Playboy’s readers on the current economic crisis, but he did say in his first column that he would be pointing fingers at some of the culprits.
McKagan’s second column stayed politically neutral, providing simplified definitions of subprime loans and adjustable-rate mortgages. This week’s article, however, has taken a decidedly political turn, praising the Clinton Administration, backing President Obama’s preferred stimulus plan as a modern version of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and blaming 8 years of Republican leadership for the current U.S. crisis.
“Let’s take a gander at some recent economic history,” writes McKagan, the bassist of Velvet Revolver. “When Clinton left office in January 2001, we had (according to CNN) a budget surplus of $230 billion. Also, our unemployment rate was at 3.9 percent according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. When Bush left office, we had a $410 billion deficit (according to the Associated Press) and our unemployment was at 7.2 percent. Hmmm.”
McKagan goes on to criticize Republicans who say Roosevelt’s policies were failures and that President Obama’s new plan too closely resembles it, by describing how his own family benefited from the New Deal. “Bullsh*t is what I say!” McKagan writes in “Stimulate This!.” “Maybe it wasn’t a fast elevator ride out of a hole, but it was a focused and upward movement out of the Great Depression. My grandfather Jon Harrington, an immigrant from Ireland who had fought in World War I as a new American, finally found work through the New Deal.”
To read the complete column, click here.