It’s official. Former President Jimmy Carter has finally lost it. The guy who literally destroyed our economy to the point that people were lining up at soup kitchens is slamming President Bush over the economy.

Former President Jimmy Carter said on Friday the “atrocious economic policies” of the Bush administration had caused the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Carter told reporters on a stopover in Brussels that “profligate spending,” massive borrowing and dramatic tax cuts since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 were behind the market turmoil and economic crisis.

“I think it’s because of the atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration,” said the 84-year-old Democrat, who served in the White House from 1977-1981 during a period of high inflation and energy crisis.

Like he was during his four years as President and every subsequent year since, Carter is just wrong. Tax cuts didn’t have a thing to with it nor did “profligate spending.” Instead it was cowardly democrats like him who caused this mess. Guys like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who fought tooth and nail to keep any new regulations on Fannie and Freddie from passing.

I hate to belabor the point, because it seems like I’m always talking about Jimmy Carter. There is nobody on this planet less qualified to give advice about anything besides peanut farming than Jimmy Carter. He was absolutely the worst president in modern history. His economic policies were an absolute disaster as was his foreign policy.

This is the guy who stopped backing the Shah which led to the coup in Iran that we’re still dealing with today. He allowed the Iranians to hold U.S. citizens hostage for 444 days and humiliate us in front of the world.

It took Reagan 8 years to heal the damage caused by Carter’s brief tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

-Chris Jones

It seems Jimmy Carter just can’t help himself anymore. Whether the former President is denouncing the sitting President, condemning Israel, yukking it up with brutal dictators, or offering unsolicited advice on any number of topics, you can always count on Jimmy for a good sound bite.

Such was the case at the DNC. Carter was originally scheduled to give a speech, but to their credit the Obama camp realized that now is not the time to start Jew bashing. So the former Peacenik-in-Chief only got to wave to the crowd this year.

Since he couldn’t speak to a huge crowd of liberals in person, he did the next best thing and spoke to MSNBC. Not surprisingly, Keith Olbermann was delighted to have the former President. Sensing a sympathetic ear, Carter spoke in glowing terms about Barack Obama, admitting that he ‘wept’ when Obama gave his famous speech about race some months back.

He also took shots at Republicans, lamenting the “subtle and sometimes overt racism” the GOP uses to gain power. He went on to insinuate that Ronald Reagan ran a racist campaign in 1980.

One could simply say that Jimmy Carter puts the ‘ass’ in classy.

But that’s not all, he also gave an interview to USA Today just before Obama’s acceptance speech and dropped a few more stink bombs:

Former president Jimmy Carter called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a “distinguished naval officer,” but he said the Arizona senator has been “milking every possible drop of advantage” from his time served as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

…he said he was bewildered by McCain’s performance at the Saddleback Presidential Forum hosted by pastor and author Rick Warren in Lake Forest, Calif., earlier this month.

Carter said that whether he was asked about religion, domestic or foreign affairs, every answer came back to McCain’s 5½ years as a POW.

“John McCain was able to weave in his experience in a Vietnam prison camp, no matter what the question was,” Carter said. “It’s much better than talking about how he’s changed his total character between being a senator, a kind of a maverick … and his acquiescence in the last few months with every kind of lobbyist pressure that the right-wing Republicans have presented.”

He also went after Joe Lieberman:

He decried Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman’s decision to “abandon” the Democrats by speaking at the Republican convention next week.

“I would hope that the Democrats could have enough senators elected in November so that we would not any longer need to include Joe Lieberman among the senators,” Carter said.

Putting aside all the ‘worst President’ labels the left throws at President Bush, the history books accurately reflect the fact that Jimmy Carter was in fact the worst President. His foreign policy and his domestic policy was an absolute disaster that Ronald Reagan spent eight years trying to clean up.

Here’s where things stood in 1980, Carter’s last year in office, and in subsequent periods:

Carter: Interest rate, 21%. Inflation, 13.5%. Unemployment, 7%. Misery Index, 20.5%. Let’s also not forget the hostage crisis in Iran along with the horribly botched rescue mission that crashed in the desert.

Reagan’s last year: Interest rate, 9%. Inflation, 4.1%. Unemployment, 5.5%. Misery Index, 9.6%.

Bush (2007): Interest rate, 8%. Inflation, 2.6%. Unemployment, 4.5%. Misery Index, 7.1%.

Jimmy Carter should stick to giving advice about peanut farming and building houses for the homeless, because he lacks any credibility in politics — unless he’s on MSNBC of course.

Jimmy Carter on Wednesday denounced Vice President Dick Cheney as a “disaster” for the country and a “militant” who has had an excessive influence in setting foreign policy.

Cheney has been on the wrong side of the debate on many issues, including an internal White House discussion over Syria in which the vice president is thought to be pushing a tough approach, Carter said.

“He’s a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world,” Carter told the BBC in an interview to air later on Wednesday.

I said it earlier this week and I’ll say it again. I think I’d prefer to hear opinions from someone besides the worst President in U.S. history. Carter spends so damn much time cozying up to dictators around the world he’s even stealing their rhetoric.

-Chris Jones

Carter’s rather smug attempt to rank President Bush as the worst president ever wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so wrong. The irony, of course, is that the peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., shares that distinction with a number of other presidential mismanagers of our nation’s economy.

Carter apparently has gotten so used to being called the “greatest living former president” that he’s forgotten to consult the record. And what the record shows is he inherited a bad economy and made it worse — much worse — before a man named Ronald Reagan came in and changed course.

Here’s where things stood in 1980, Carter’s last year in office, and in subsequent periods:

Carter: Interest rate, 21%. Inflation, 13.5%. Unemployment, 7%. The so-called “Misery Index,” which Carter used to great effect in his 1976 campaign to win election, 20.5%.

Reagan’s last year: Interest rate, 9%. Inflation, 4.1%. Unemployment, 5.5%. Misery Index, 9.6%.

Bush today: Interest rate, 8%. Inflation, 2.6%. Unemployment, 4.5%. Misery Index, 7.1%.

It’s not even close. The only question is: Why did things get so bad under Carter? And that’s a long story. The fundamental reason, however, is he made mistake after mistake, blinded by the leftist rhetoric his party adopted after the infamous ’72 Democratic Convention, when the so-called New Left seized control.

In office, Carter adopted the Keynesian economics of the time, buying into the theory that there was a reverse “trade-off” between inflation and unemployment — an idea that proved spectacularly wrong. The U.S. became mired in “stagflation,” with both inflation and unemployment rising sharply.

As things grew worse, Carter sharply boosted government spending. When that didn’t work, he blamed the American people. “I think it’s inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living than what everybody had always anticipated,” he told advisers in 1979. “The only trend is downward. But it’s impossible to get people to face up to this.”

Those remarks were followed by his now-famous “malaise” speech in which he unveiled six proposals — including import quotas, windfall profits taxes and increased spending on alternative fuels — to combat higher oil prices charged by OPEC. Nothing about tax cuts. Nothing about finding more energy. In short, he told Americans to consume less, but pay more.

“We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ and that even our great nation has its recognized limits,” Carter said, borrowing heavily from the “limits to growth” movement that swept liberal intellectual circles in the ’70s.

With public anger growing and his own polls lagging, Carter started wearing sweaters and encouraging us to turn down the thermostat. But his big spending didn’t work. The resulting budget deficit, 12 times bigger than the one President Nixon left, gave him a serious public relations problem.

On this score, Carter might have escaped his own malaise if he had cut taxes to get the economy going again. But even with marginal income tax rates at a hefty 70%, he accepted the common wisdom that a tax cut would boost inflation and lower government revenue. He was dead wrong.

As noted in “The Commanding Heights,” a leading economic history of the last century, “Carter’s attempts to follow Keynes’ formula and spend his way out of trouble were going nowhere.”

Eventually (but grudgingly), Carter did agree to slash the tax rate on capital gains to 28% from 40%. But that didn’t kick in until 1979. By then it was too late to help him politically.

Two other moves have garnered Carter praise: setting deregulation in motion and naming Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in 1979. Carter did begin deregulation, for which he deserves credit. And to be sure, Volcker clamped down on the growth in money supply, bringing on a deep recession but also killing the inflationary spiral.

Inflation, however, was already easing when Carter entered office. It was only after he named a political supporter, the late G. William Miller, as Fed chairman that prices really took off. Miller, who served only a year, is now viewed as the worst Fed chief ever.

Volcker? He wasn’t Carter’s choice. He was nominated only after a contingent of Wall Street power brokers, alarmed at the economy’s decline, went to the White House and demanded the appointment of the well-respected president of the New York Fed.

In his last years in office, Carter spoke of an “erosion of our confidence in the future.” But his failure to support the Shah of Iran led to a takeover of that oil-rich republic by fundamentalist Muslims, and a second Mideast oil shock hammered the economy and pushed inflation to new highs.

Desperate, Carter tried “voluntary” wage and price controls. They didn’t work. He tried credit controls. They didn’t work. He kept oil-price controls mostly in place, and created a vast new bureaucracy — the Energy Department — that has since wasted tens of billions of dollars without creating a single drop of new energy.

The result can be seen in key indicators of American well-being. Real median after-tax income fell nearly 3% during Carter’s last two years. For his entire term, productivity — the fuel for future growth in standards of living — rose a miserable 0.6% a year.

That’s why, when candidate Ronald Reagan said, “Ask yourself if you’re better off today than you were four years ago,” the answer came back a resounding “No.”

[Investors Business Daily]