"The terrorist attack on 9/11 was a shock and distraction to the general population; however, the same underlying socioeconomic conditions existed as before. Not only was there a recession that bordered on a crisis, but Bush's jaw-dropping economic policies further widened the socio-economic moat by transferring another couple trillion dollars of national wealth to the super-rich through unprecedented tax cuts for the top two percent and credits for large corporations, by record boosts in funding to the military-industrial complex, and by imposing further cuts in programs aimed at the middle and lower-middle classes. This final, gargantuan wealth transfer push will outlast Bush for decades. Indeed, when Bush first took power, his administration floated the idea of ending corporate taxes altogether, shifting more burden onto the "individual" (a euphemism for the middle class). The first part of Bush's second term was devoted to the "privatization" of Social Security, a thinly disguised trick to eventually kill the whole program and further enrich a few plutocrats. A study by University of Chicago economist Austan D. Goolsbee showed that Wall Street firms stood to earn up to a trillion dollars in trading fees if the plan goes through. Bush's rush to make America feudal has become so obscene that it straddles the line between cheap comedy and gratuitous evil, as if his economic policy was the product of a plutocrat's gag, just to see how far they could take things, to see how much they could get away with."