Look, you’re the one trying to spin this by comparing it to the recent past to avoid having to simply evaluate the current state of the economy.
If someone says, “The economy is good, for reasons X, Y, and Z”, that is a statement of fact.
If someone else says, “Yeah, but what about what happened before? What about all the jobs lost three years ago? The gains still haven’t caught up with the losses.” That is spin. An attempt to broaden the discussion away from the current state of the economy for partisan reasons.
Gawdamighty, Sam, you really are that dishonest, aren’t you?
If someone says “The economy is *bad * because of x, y, and z”, that is a statement of fact - provided the facts are real and representative of the situation. But you dismiss that because you’re determined to use facts that seem to show otherwise. Unfortunately, you’re confusing the baseline with the first derivative - if more people are out of work now than there were before, then the economy is bad. The slope may be positive, but the magnitude is still negative. Got it? Good.
Now try this: If you’re attempting a historical comparison, the only kind that applies in fact, the magnitudes matter *more * than the slope. There has been a net loss of employment in the US under Bush - fact, not spin. That hasn’t happened in any other administration since Hoover’s - fact, not spin. There is some evidence that it’s finally bottomed out - fact, not spin. It’s still negative - fact, not spin. Some burger-flippers have been rehired - fact. That means the situation is good overall - spin, not fact, sorry.
Until you can use the words “fact” and “spin” accurately, don’t waste your time and ours with it, okay? Here’s a hint: “Fact” does not mean “whatever supports the Republicans”, and “Spin” does not mean “whatever supports the Democrats”. Yet that is truly all your last post comes down to.
Yeah, I must be crazy, relying on crazy things like standard economic indicators.
Because everyone knows that when a businessman is thinking of investing, and wants to see how well the economy is doing, seeing a great jobs report isn’t that important. Instead, he surely goes, “Wait a minute! It’s irrelevant how good the numbers are, because if we go back and look at the last three years, we find out that there’s still a net job loss! Oh, woe is me!”
Outside of partisan SPIN, what happened three years ago is IRRELEVANT to what is happening NOW.
Or let me ask you this, ElvisL1ves… Let’s say the first three years of the Bush presidency had created 2 million jobs, but recently the economy had taken a major downturn and had lost a million jobs in 100 days. Would you be sitting here right now saying, “Hey, the economy is doing pretty good, because even with the current job losses, it’s still created a million jobs over the last three years!”. Or would you be saying, “It doesn’t matter what happened before - the economy sucks RIGHT NOW, and that’s what matters.”
Unless you can honestly say that you would be defending Bush, then you are engaging in SPIN.
Really? I’ve quoted generally accepted economic indicators - ones that have been used for decades. Manufacturing growth, jobs reports, consumer confidence, home sales, GDP growth. All of the major economic indicators are WAY up.
This is a ridiculous claim. A good economy is a good economy. An economy doesn’t become ‘good’ after it overcomes some arbitrary losses in the past. if the ‘magnitude is still negative’, that just means that previous economies were BAD. That says nothing about how good or bad the current one is.
And you guys are accusing me of spin. Amazing. What will you do if Bush creates enough jobs to overcome the ones lost during the recession? Oh, let me answer: You’ll move the goalposts, claiming that he SHOULD have created five million, so just creating a million or so is a sign of a BAD economy. Or, you’ll do like Kerry and cobble up some goofball new metric that involves some bizarre combination of the only indicators you can find that aren’t positive. Or you’ll fall back on the ‘McJobs’ argument. Or something else. Whatever you’ll do, you won’t be honest. Because you need to convince people that the economy is bad so you can win an election.
Go tell that to the folks who lost their jobs and still haven’t gotten back on their feet. The world is not re-created anew every morning; what happened three years ago is very relevant to what is happening now.
I’d be defending Bush, but then I’m honest with myself.
And as I’ve said before, economic indicators don’t vote – people do. And people who’ve lost their jobs, or who’ve seen their raises shrink, or who are watching their dollars get stretched farther and farther by rising costs, won’t give a rat’s patootie about how many more points the stock market has gone up today, or how some economist says we’re all happy and prosperous and that shrinking savings account is an illusion.
Praising George W. Bush for leading us out of the swamp while ignoring the fact that he’s the one who led us into it is spin of the highest order.
Claiming that George Bush ‘lead us into the swamp’ is spin of the highest order. The causes of the last downturn are pretty well accepted - a dot-com bust, followed by the shock of 9/11. Plus, inventories were too high, so manufacturers cut back on production. All of this had absolutely nothing to do with Bush. And besides that, all the steps Bush took were classical stimulus - cutting taxes, increasing spending, and the fed cutting interest rates. If you want to claim that it’s all Bush’s fault, you have to do more than just wave your hands and throw blame around. Explain, specifically, which legislation he passed that damaged the economy, and please explain the mechanism by which the damage happened.
And, it was the God-damn most expensive stimulus package in history. For what we spent and will continue to spend on this recovery, we could probably have freakin’ paid each of those who have now found jobs again several hundred thousand bucks! (I guess Krugman actually did the math once based on the President’s own inflated claims of how much job growth his tax cut plans would be responsible for.)
If the American people are going to re-elect Bush for mortgaging the farm to buy a marginally stronger recovery than might have otherwise occurred when the economy cycled back up anyway, they will deserve what they get.
Why the hell do you keep saying that? The “recession”, according to the OMB itself, ended the month after 9/11. Never mind, I know why you keep blaming everyone but Bush, but it would be a great relief to hear you admit it.
Dammit, you do know better. Taxes were cut on people who would *not * stimulate wealth-producing actions. Increasing spending by the government is a “classical stimulus” only when it’s spent in ways that further help produce wealth. Interest rates were already as damn low as they’d ever been when Bush inherited them. Keynes would be outraged at your blatant spin.
You do need to drop that incessant middle-excluding of yours, which only hides whatever validity your point may have. Nobody is claiming that “it’s all Bush’s fault”, as you also must damn well know. You, however, are claiming that it isn’t *any * of Bush’s fault. That extreme position is the one that constitutes handwaving and blamethrowing.
This is a reasonable argument, that can be defended. Not that I think you could have paid for 1.4 million jobs with that money - Just one year of pay for that many jobs at a reasonable salary would be 50 billion dollars. Plus, more jobs are coming.
However, what Bush did was basically a Keynesian ‘pump priming’, and there is a very good argument against that - the problem with Keynsianism is that the lag time for the government to take action and have it take effect is so long that it probably doesn’t help the recovery much, but when it kicks in it’s during an economy that is already taking off, causing it to overheat. That may in fact happen. The economy might get TOO good, triggering inflation and requiring the fed to raise interest rates higher than it normally would to choke off the money supply.
But that’s a different argument. People who are claiming that the economy is not very good are simply wrong - all empirical evidence points towards an economy that is growing madly.
“Growing madly” isn’t worth a helluva lot if you’re already in the hole to begin with. When you’re falling behind in a 10,000 meter run, nobody gives a toot how fast you’re running – it’s only how far behind that counts.
You’ve made two serious errors in this single sentence.
Firstly, a logical error. Growth rates tells you how things might look in the future, not now. Let’s assume for the moment that the US economy is growing madly. The economy (using whatever measure) might be in absolutely fantastic shape and getting better, or it might be in shocking condition but getting better. The growth rate tells you nothing about whether the economy currently is good or not.
Secondly, a factual error:
The facts simply don’t match your “growing madly” claim.
Well, to be fair that is data that wasn’t available when I wrote that. It looks like the Friday reports were off a bit from what people were predicting. We’ll have to see if the other month-end data looks like. But that explains the big sell-off yesterday in the market.
An assertion that the US economy is “growing madly” is beyond Sam’s habitual loyalist-Republican spin and into the realm of simple lazy bullshit. *Average * job creation rate during the reviled Clinton Administration was on the order of 260,000 per month, including the slow period he started with. Average. Bush has yet to turn in one single month as good as Clinton’s average, and his own average is in fact negative, but a couple of months that have been within sight of Clinton’s are enough for good old predictable **Sam ** to call that “growing madly”. The data to conclude that *was * “available” in time for that last post, too.
Classic weaseling on the Keynesian pump-priming argument, too- anything that could be said to have worked in any way is due to Bush’s brilliant leadership, and anything that didn’t wasn’t his fault anyway. *Who * are you trying to convince of *what * with that approach?
More facts (those pesky things) for Sam Stone to spin, courtesy of the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute:
But who cares about working families, as long as the CEOs are cashing in:
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – “economic indicators” don’t vote, people do. And all the spin in the world won’t change the fact that the people are the ones taking it in the shorts by Bush’s policies.
Why do you guys have to go out of your way to be obnoxious with the comments about “Those pesky things like facts” and all this? I have been quoting facts continuously, and I responded immediately to the current jobs report and admitted it was disappointing.
But if you’re going to start being obnoxious about ‘facts’, you’d better make sure you get yours right. For instance:
ElvisL1ves said:
Jobs created in March: 337,000.
Jobs created in April: 288,000
GDP growth is also up substantially. Manufacturing growth has been at over 7% this year. Productivity is up 30% since Bush took office.
And the final nail in the coffin of your, “The economy isn’t doing so well” is that the fed had to raise rates on Wednesday to stave off inflation due to rapid growth. And some were worried that they’d raise it a half point because the growth is so much higher than expected.
Weaseling? I was agreeing with Jshore that his anti-Bush argument was a good point. How in the hell is that weaseling?
And please show me where I said that this was all Bush’s doing? My argument from the beginning was that the economy was going to be an asset in the election. I have said many times before that Presidents have a very limited ability to affect short-term market impulses. Stop jerking your knees.
Thanks for those interesting statistics, courtesy of the EPI, rjung. I think they provide some further evidence that the President’s economic policies really do make some difference. Previous statistics on income growth from the 1980s and 1990s also showed this: The income gains during the Reagan years were very concentrated at the top while during the Clinton years they were more broadly distributed. (Inequality still grew during the Clinton years, with the top 1% continuing to do phenomenally…but the chasm didn’t grow as rapidly.)
If you care mainly about how the comfortable do, then one can in fact design policies that mainly benefit them while trickling down only a little bit to the middle and lower classes.
Well, they sure has hell better be because the real big bills for the tax cuts are still coming too. And, while the cost to create 1.4 million jobs may be 50 billion dollars. [url=http://www.ctj.org/pdf/def0104.pdf]The cost of tax cuts this year alone is $289 billion this year. (If you are way over-generous and assume all those jobs are a result of the tax cuts, there would be some offsetting revenue from the taxes paid by those workers but it would still only be a small fraction of the $289 billion.) By 2010, if the expiring provisions are extended as Bush wants (and counting interest on the additional debt), the costs will top $500 billion per year.
Sam, I know that you are old enough to have been around for the recovery part of an economic cycle before so I don’t see why you are making it sound like this is some sort of dramatic thing. Doesn’t the fed always raise rates once the economy starts recovering? I’d imagine if anything, the time lag between the official end of the recession and when the fed started raising rates might be some new record. And, this comes after a time when the fed dropped the rates down to record or near record low levels.
To keep my own side honest, I should point out that while the Economic Policy Institute may be nonpartisan, it is definitely left-leaning. That doesn’t necessarily do any damage to their numbers, but they’re not the CBO as far as non-ideological analysis. At the very least, they choose their targets.
But if labor costs go up, then laborers have more money. Typically, they use that money to buy things – food, clothing shelter, transportation, typical lower class frivolities, because they would have to have a LOT more money to make saving or investing sensible. So the economy grows because more things are being bought.
If on the other hand you give extremely wealthy Americans more money they tend to invest it or save it, because they have already bought whatever it is they want, as a general rule. This tends to be good for Wall Street but bad for the ecnomy, because companies have more money but it’s not because new goods or services are being purchased, creating new wealth, it’s just because a greater percentage of the economy is investment capital. Since the middle class and the poor tend to have to take up the brunt of the tax breaks given to the wealthy, there’s LESS money to go around for these goods and services. Meaning we have companies investing more to get their share of a shrinking pie. Not a good deal.
That’s why the Bush tax cut sucked economically. The crash that followed the bursting of the dotcom bubble would have been much shorter and less severe under the administration of a sensible president, even taking 9/11 into account.