Bachmann announces she's running

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Sam_Stone

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to shoot that particular claim down. The CBO did NOT say the stimulus worked. Their job is to try and give updates on the stimulus, and what they do is simply re-run the original models used to generate the pre-stimulus estimate of its effect, updating the forecast based on changes to legislation.

The CBO report in question is here. Notice that it’s a year and a half old, so it can’t possibly reflect what has actually happened as a result of the stimulus.

At last, a real post. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the thread topic, true, but at least it contains positions on reality that can be accepted or refuted.

If you think people are using an obsolete set of data or summary of them, Sam, then why don’t you go to the source and see if a newer report is available? It’s right there on the CBO website on its Studies and Reports page. The pdf is entitled Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from January 2011 Through March 2011 and dated May 2011. That’s as recent as can be.

The report is qualified within an inch of its life, as it properly should be, but contains these conclusions:

CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the first quarter of calendar year 2011:

• They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.1 percent and 3.1 percent,

• Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.6 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,

• Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 3.3 million, and

• Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.6 million to 4.6 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise, as shown in Table 1.
  (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases

During the time period reflected by the report “ARRA funded more than 571,000 full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs.”

In addition, the current report states that “Purchases of Goods and Services by the Federal Government” has had the best multiplier effect, with a low estimate of 1.0 and a high estimate of 2.5. (Transfer payments to states, also federal spending, ties it.) Your cite, from conservative economist John Taylor, tried to refute the effectiveness of the stimulus by arguing that the multiplier with a high estimate of 1.5 was wrong and the real numbers were too low to work. I can’t tell from that cite where he gets that number from, but your own cite of the February 2010 CBO report gives the same 1.0 to 2.5 range as the current report. Those are extremely good numbers. More than that, they embarrass the argument that federal spending should be cut and cut and cut and nothing else. Federal spending is by far by the best stimulus, according to the CBO, and if logic is to be any guide, it should be vastly increased.

You can respond that technically the CBO never comes out and states directly that the stimulus worked or didn’t work. Your case is weakened, fatally in my estimation, by the use of cites from people looking at the very same numbers as the rest of us and using them to state that the stimulus did not work. The numbers have meaning, more than just in the eye of the beholder if critics must resort to saying that the numbers are wrong to make their case.

Whether the stimulus was the right amount, was used correctly, or should have been continued are other arguments that the CBO report does not directly address, although some inferences can be made. That argument doesn’t have any place here in Elections, where I had hoped we would, you know, analyze the race rather than get mired down in GD glurge.

But if you are going to disparage an old source when the newer version is at your fingertips and says more of the same only better, you have no credibility.

[DSeid]

@Recovering_Republican

… Whether or not Bachmann knows where John Wayne was born isn’t really that important. It’s whether she can extracate us from this current mess or not.

I know one advantage she’d have in her favor, she’d have co-operation in Congress.

Cooperation to do wrong things is not an advantage.

Agreed that a President does not need to be a genius. But (s)he does need to surround her/himself with people who are that smart and be able to manage the conflicting information those people then give. A President needs to be smart enough to know when they don’t know something and not just make it up on the fly. Someone not smart enough to know that has no business even running for the office.

[gonzomax]

Bachmanns husband says gays are “barbarians” who need discipline. Perhaps he thinks a good spanking is in order.

[Lionne]

This thread would be a great drinking game - do a shot every time RR mentions 9.1% unemployment.

[pseudotriton_ruber_ruber]

It’s just amazing how people who can get hysterical over a first-term Senator running for the Presidency are so blase about a two-term Congressperson, who can’t speak six sentences without rewriting elementary school American history, and whose handlers need to douse “flake”/ “nutbag”/“wacko” fires regularly, running for that same office. Now “inexperienced” isn’t an issue? Now “needs to get to up to speed,” and “unprepared for the office” is no big deal? What happened? Were you wrong about Obama’s need for much more on his resume in 2008? Or are you wrong about Bachmann’s lack of qualifications now?

I hope you’re not going to tell me that Bachmann is simply more qualified than Obama was in 2008.

[Sam_Stone]

@Exapno_Mapcase

At last, a real post. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the thread topic, true, but at least it contains positions on reality that can be accepted or refuted.

If you think people are using an obsolete set of data or summary of them, Sam, then why don’t you go to the source and see if a newer report is available? It’s right there on the CBO website on its Studies and Reports page. The pdf is entitled Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from January 2011 Through March 2011 and dated May 2011. That’s as recent as can be.

The report is qualified within an inch of its life, as it properly should be, but contains these conclusions:

You’re not listening to what I’m saying. The CBO reports are NOT based on actual, measured data. They are based on two things: One is the submitted reports of ‘jobs created’ by entities who received stimulus funds. Pretty much everyone agrees that these numbers are totally bogus, they’re not scientific, and they are one-sided - they can’t possibly measure jobs lost elsewhere due to crowding out or other issues like loss of confidence in the business community due to a trillion-dollar high debt. Those reports are also not objective, and they suffer from a heavy amount of bias - the recipients of the stimulus have a strong incentive to exaggerate the jobs created.
The other method the CBO uses is to re-run the SAME MODEL it used to estimate the impact of the stimulus in the first place. With each new report, all they do is tweak the inputs to the model to account for actual legislative changes (i.e. money that the government said would be spent on X, but wasn’t). This approach is always going to return numbers very close to the original estimates, unless the government fails to deliver the stimulus money or something.

The CBO report is basically a report on how the stimulus was implemented, and what its theoretical effects should have been given the assumptions baked into the stimulus plan in the first place. It’s not the CBO’s job to do original academic research to determine whether or not the stimulus did what the model said it would do - its job is to take the assumptions handed to it by congress and crank out the numbers based on those assumptions.

Since the entire argument revolves around whether the CBO’s models and assumptions are valid or a complete picture of the economy, it’s crazy to attempt to argue the point by simply pointing to the updated model prediction and saying, “See? It worked.”

The paper I just linked to is actual research using measured DATA from the economy, not simply a report of the results obtained by running an economic model against a bunch of assumptions. There have been a half-dozen of these papers published recently, and I didn’t find one that showed the kind of effects on the economy that the CBO’s model predicted.

[Finagle]

@Sam_Stone

I looked at every one of them, but I didn’t have a lot of time this morning. If you’d like, later when I have time I can link to some peer-reviewed recent papers which say the same thing.

You can start with this one.

From the introduction:

That’s a net LOSS of 550,000 jobs due to the stimulus, according to this paper.

Yeah…you might want to start a GD thread on “Did the stimulus work?” to avoid derailing this thread even further, but this particular cite is pretty far from convincing and you cherry-picked the most damning part of the summary without including the
part about “Specifically, a 90% confidence interval for government jobs gained is between approximately zero and 900 thousand and the counterpart for private HELP services jobs lost is 160 to 1378 thousand.” and
“e best-case scenario for an effectual ARRA has the Act creating/saving a (point estimate) net 659 thousand jobs, mainly in government.”

In other words, even if you buy their methodology completely (and many people don’t), their error bars are so wide that you could as easily say that 659,000 jobs were saved as 550,000 were lost.

[Sam_Stone]

Yes, you could. But I simply took the summary numbers in their introduction as being representative of the median.

But in any event, Christina Romer’s initial model for the stimulus predicted 3.6 million jobs. And even if the jobs created were in the high end of this study’s estimate then some small amount of jobs were created (maybe 1/5 of what the models showed), and the net effect was a big transfer of jobs from the private to the public sector, at a cost of almost a trillion dollars. Not what most Americans would think was a good outcome.

[joebuck20]

@Lionne

This thread would be a great drinking game - do a shot every time RR mentions 9.1% unemployment.

Or every time he mentions that 20 percent of high school graduates can’t read their diplomas.

Unfortunately, though, I don’t think it would take long to succumb to alcohol poisoning.

[Knorf]

Now, what Sam Stone has presented is a real argument. Honorable. Well done.

I don’t agree with the conclusions, but give the guy some credit.

[Recovering_Republican]

@gonzomax

Whats your zero point? When Bush left jobs were dropping at an incredible rate. If Obama came in and stopped the bleeding, would that be good? But you could not say he created jobs, but obviously saved them. If jobs were lost at a much lower rate after the stimulus, would you say no jobs were created? It is a bad game of semantics. The stimulus saved millions of jobs, cut the bleeding and created a lot of jobs. But the Repubs slashing a lot of the program and insisting of still more corporate tax cuts, hurt the impact of the stimulus. Tax cuts have been demonstrated clearly since Reagan, to be job killers. They do not create jobs.

Again, as we’ve been told, the subject of this thread is Bachmann. Not Obama and not Bush.

You don’t get credit for “saving” jobs. I know it is COMPLETELY unfair, but it doesn’t work like that. Bush-41 saved a lot of jobs when he went back on his word and raised taxes to save the banking industry. But the Democrats and even some republicans crucified the guy for doing it, and Ross Perot came in on the train from crazytown and made his life miserable.

[Recovering_Republican]

@pseudotriton_ruber_ruber

It’s just amazing how people who can get hysterical over a first-term Senator running for the Presidency are so blase about a two-term Congressperson, who can’t speak six sentences without rewriting elementary school American history, and whose handlers need to douse “flake”/ “nutbag”/“wacko” fires regularly, running for that same office. Now “inexperienced” isn’t an issue? Now “needs to get to up to speed,” and “unprepared for the office” is no big deal? What happened? Were you wrong about Obama’s need for much more on his resume in 2008? Or are you wrong about Bachmann’s lack of qualifications now?

I hope you’re not going to tell me that Bachmann is simply more qualified than Obama was in 2008.

Well, as I’ve said, Bachmann is not my first choice. My first choice right now is Rick Perry. I’ll be further blunt about it, if it’s a choice between Obama and Bachmann, it will truly be a South Park election- the choice between a douche and a turd.

That said, if you look at every election, especially ones where they’ve been able to knock off incumbants, nobody every won with the “safe” guy. They won it by swinging for the fences, and Bachman is a swing for the fences. She’s the only one who gets republican blood boiling right now.

[Recovering_Republican]

@Lionne

This thread would be a great drinking game - do a shot every time RR mentions 9.1% unemployment.

After Friday, I’ll probably be talking about 9.3% unemployment, and then we’ll all need a drink.

[Recovering_Republican]

@gonzomax

Bachmann's Waterloo - FactCheck.org
Bachmann is not making minor errors. She is lying over and over.

Or she’s just saying things you don’t like.

Heck, they’re politicians. They ALL lie. They all twist the truth.

[Recovering_Republican]

I posed this question on one of the Palin threads, but it probably applies here to Bachmann a well.

If Bachmann would be so easy for Obama to beat, you would think you guys would be anxious for her nomination. Might even vote for her in the primary since Obama won’t face any challengers. Slop over might even carry over to house and senate races.

But it seems to me that she (and Palin) are the ones that get your blood boiling, while Perry or Romney who would be much more formidable challengers, meh, not so much.

[amanset]

@joebuck20

Or every time he mentions that 20 percent of high school graduates can’t read their diplomas.

Did we ever get a cite for that and/or a description of what a “real job” is? I gave up a few pages back as it seemed cleasr to me that answers weren’t going to be given, just the same uncited “statistics” thrown our way again and again. Was like trying to discuss with a particularly poorly designed/coded student AI project.

[ElvisL1ves]

You’re right about that assessment of their real chances, but you’re not seeing that this discussion is really about making fun of Republicans - for allowing either of those two fools to be considered actual plausible nominees for Leader of the Free World.

And your preference among them, Rick Perry, is a secessionist! If he gets in the spotlight, you’ll certainly hear more about that.

[amanset]

@Recovering_Republican

If Bachmann would be so easy for Obama to beat, you would think you guys would be anxious for her nomination.

I’m pretty sure if you looked you’d find them. You mentioned Palin, so I should throw in that I have definitely seen such things written about Palin around here.

And no I’m not going to search them out. Life’s too short.

[Typo_Knig]

I have seen too many idiots elected to the White House to wish seeing any idiot nominated, even by the other party. What if the idiot wins? I am not sure the republic can take another dumb president. We have more than enough problems with smart presidents doing dumb things.

[Folacin]

@Recovering_Republican

If Bachmann would be so easy for Obama to beat, you would think you guys would be anxious for her nomination. Might even vote for her in the primary since Obama won’t face any challengers.

I would prefer to have two reasonable candidates. I hear liberals talking about voting for Bachmann/Plain to make Obama a shoo-in, but it’s a long way to the election. If things go bad (or worse, depending on your viewpoint) - then Obama may be unelectable, whether it’s his fault or not. If that happens, I’d prefer that the Republicans have a sane person leading their ticket.