GOP think tank spot "We are facing a new recession" REALLY!?

[Meeko]

There is an anti Obama spot running here stating that we are now facing a second recession.

1. How true is this claim?

2. How can they get away stating this, if it is wrong?

[Ludovic]

Not familiar with the spot, but going off the fiscal cliff might send us into a new recession, by arbitrarily cutting much government spending by 25% and raising taxes on certain people without regards to if it’s the right time or means to do so.

The identity of those who hope us to take us off this cliff is left as an exercise to the reader. But it’s the same people who have explicitly avowed to do anything they can to hold power.

[John_Mace]

@Meeko

There is an anti Obama spot running here stating that we are now facing a second recession.

1. How true is this claim?

Who knows? We can’t predict recessions.

2. How can they get away stating this, if it is wrong?

It can’t be proven wrong. But what makes you think one can’t lie in a political ad? Free speech doesn’t mean only speech which can be proven to be correct.

[Trom]

Here’s one fund manager’s weekly comment. He believes we entered a recession last quarter. I don’t believe he’s a Republican, though.

In summary, analysts who interpret economic data as a stream of unconnected anecdotes are likely to find recent data encouraging, and will easily dismiss any concern about a U.S. recession on that basis. For our part, the internals of the economic picture – new orders, backlogs, real income growth, and even the employment components of prominent economic surveys – continue to deteriorate. Based on dozens of economic variables and methods that account for leading/lagging relationships (e.g. unobserved components estimates) our view remains that the U.S. economy has already entered a recession. We are certainly open to changing that view in the event that we observe a broad and sustained firming in leading economic measures, particularly those that are broadly based on orders, production, sales and income. But at present, those measures remain generally weak, and their direction remains flat to down (though the bright spot is that they are not collapsing as they did in 2008), while the employment-related measures have deteriorated significantly.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

Well, if Romney is elected, and he cuts government spending by a whole pile, a recession will probably follow. So they’re correct.