I’m ready for you to lay your thing down. I’m totally cued in…
Sam, what is the average of 6.9, 6.1, 5.6, 5.4, 4.9, 4.5, 4.2, and 4? Because those are the numbers in your cite for the unemployment rate from 1993 through 2000. Try as I might, I cannot get Excel to yield an average for those numbers of 6.3.
It keeps telling me that the sum of those numbers is 41.6, and that if I divide 41.6 by 8, the average is 5.2. When I ask it for “=average(cell range in question),” it keeps wanting to tell me that is 5.2.
Did you mean some other 8 years for Clinton?
The eight years for Bush in your cite do average 5.26, or 5.3%, rounded up. But I think 5.2 is not 6.3, and I think 5.2 < 5.3. It looks like your own cite keeps trying to tell me that Bush’s unemployment numbers were on average higher than Clinton’s, and that Clintons weren’t 6.3, but you clearly said that they were. Can you explain this discrepancy?
What was that about constant disortions and hysterical revisionism? Is this one of those “your math / the math” kind of things?
Left intact for ironic purposes. (Didn’t you say that you got that other bit of claptrap from Drudge, and threw it up in an OP without thinking?)
This is the best that the conservatives can offer for rational, intelligent discussion?
Well, my last name is really Cumming, but since I like Sly and the Family, I thought it would be better and more modest if I followed my first and middle name with Stone.
Even giving Sam Stone the benefit of the doubt that he made a typo in the post, or ran the numbers wrong, that is pretty hilarious. Perhaps we should coin Sam Stone’s law: a post attempting to correct the apprehension that you post without factual basis will contain a factual error.
Just shoot me now. Sorry about that. I used the data from 1992 to 2000. So let’s use the corrected data, and say that Clinton and Bush had about the same level of unemployment.
In any event, the point remains unchanged that unemployment levels under Bush were pretty good. By any measure, it was not a terrible economy. Hopefully, now that some of you have seen a terrible economy maybe for the first time in your life, you’ll realize that the Bush years were pretty good years, economically speaking. You could argue that they could have been better, or that some demographic groups did not advance as much as they should have if you want, and you could make a reasonable case for that. But some around here used to go on and on about how the economy was a complete disaster.
But then, that’s when they also claimed that Bush’s 250 billion dollar deficit was horribly irresponsible and fiscally unsustainable. Amazing how viewpoints can change when the other part is in power. Now Obama’s growing government like crazy and he’ll be running trillion dollar deficits until he leaves office, and suddenly that’s okay.
The Second Stone: Really, I was just trying to make a point about the largest macroeconomic indicators being quite good under Bush. I know all the other arguments you’re making. You’re right about Clinton inheriting a bit of a mess. I actually didn’t mean to criticize Clinton - in fact think he was a good president, and I’ve said that for years. I was trying to use the good Clinton years as a comparison against the Bush years, and to compare either one of them to today’s economy as an exercise in realizing what a bad economy really looks like.
And I know it’s now an article of faith to blame the entire economic downturn on deregulation. This probably isn’t the forum to rehash that, but suffice it to say that there are plenty of villians here, and government comes off looking pretty bad as well - both Republican and Democrat. For some reason, you choose to decide that the crisis discredits the market and justifies giving more power to the government, and when I look at it, I see the government to be at least as culpable, and a whole lot more dangerous if given free reign with the economy. The clowns in Washington will wreck the economy if you give them the chance, and they’re already off to a good start.
You know, the people of California once trusted their government to look after them. Suckers. And California was a Liberal’s dream: high taxes on the rich, lots of social funding, mass transit, lots of unions, zoning laws to prevent the suburbs from growing, plenty of environmental regulations and ‘green’ initiatives. And they’re soon about to be bankrupt.
Why would you ever trust that the federal government will do any better? Because smarter people are at the top? Because you just want to hope that everything gets fixed?
Except, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t California’s problem a freeze on property taxes, a series of referendums that mandated spending, and a budgetary process that makes tax increases nearly impossible?
Well hell, now I don’t know what I did. I tried every combination of screw-ups, and can’t get that number again. God only knows - maybe a data entry error. Whatever it was, it wasn’t intelligent. And my timing sucks.
Gee, Sam, if memory swerves, thats not quite accurate. Seems to me a lot of the bitching and bellyaching had to do with the numbers that weren’t included in the “official” deficit. Like, just for instance, a ruinously expensive military adventure that was “emergency” funding for…what, five years?
Now, of course, there really is an emergency, an honest-to-goodness threat which requires a ginormous outlay of cash. Which we are perfectly ill-prepared to do, because we already borrowed 1.7 godzillabucks for this fershlugginer war.
And, of course, all the while, as we were slipping towards the Abyss, the Alpha Lemming was doing cheerleading cartwheels across the Rose Garden telling us how great the housing market was doing, the “ownership society” was going to be the engine of our economy.
So, no, the horrendous deficit isn’t another example of lefty hypocrisy, its the bandage on the open wound left by a conservative administration pursuing a neo-conservative foreign policy and a libertarian conservative financial regulation agenda. If government is growing, its only to fill the huge vacuum left from everything else imploding!
No. No. No. Here is a chart of the deficits of presidents going back to Wilson. U.S. Federal Deficits, Presidents, and Congress Bush increased deficits by at least $300 billion a year on average, adding more than $2 trillion to the debt and then dumping enormous amounts of unbooked obligations on Obama, easily doubling that figure. Republicans are generally doing this, it having been a pattern since the Reagan years. Must Obama now do a Keynesian economic heimlich? Yes. We will be much, much worse off without such measure, including a possible total collapse of the economy. He is not in my opinion putting enough money into the economy. Yes, it will be inflationary, but that is better than deflationary.
You cannot look at standard economic indicators and say they have the same meaning as during peace time if you are running a major war with supply lines clear around the globe, especially if it is being done off the books: that is, not budgeted for with everything else. Bush’s war is what he will be remembered for, and not in a good way. He wanted a blank check, so he took it off budget, and ruined the economy.
Bush cut the SEC enforcement budget (trade fees to SEC were cut by 75%) and guys like Madoff went on for years beyond what they should have. Banks and insurers and investors were all mixed, so that the same people who evaluated risk were the ones paid the profits for taking the risks. (Glass Steagall paraphrase) This sucked the big one. Banks had their capitalization requirements lowered (for 30 years) and guess what? They are failing all over. Who would have thought? Glass and Steagall thought back in the 30s. (And all the other acts like theirs.)
Let’s take it out of order. California is in a deep mess that will only get deeper until we do not have to have a 2/3 majority to pass a budget. We have that and a 2/3 majority needed to raise taxes which I don’t think needs changing. We cannot live with or make do with the budget portion. That alone is destroying California and has been for 30 years. Without that one requirement, we would be much better off, but every year at budget time it is the same stupid shit, the minority ruins our credit rating by demanding huge amounts of pork. The one guy necessary to cross over from the Republicans demanded who knows how much money, but I do know he gets three constitutional amendments put on the ballot. None of them to require only a majority for a budget. Requiring that a minority of voting members can hold up anything they want to is a disaster. That is the lesson of California.
Next. I’m a liberal (duh). But I don’t mind an honest conservative of any stripe. But conservatism has been for the large part dishonest since the Reagan years when they decided that they would talk about fiscal responsibility, but then “borrow and spend”. The last two Democratic administrations did much, much better on fiscal responsibility than the last three Republican administrations. Clinton fought hard against a Republican majority for his budget ideas, which worked. He closed down the government in a showdown with Gingrich, won, and eventually balanced the budget. Bush and all of the Republicans (and damn Democrats who went along with it) busted the budget year after year after year. As annoying as the Republicans are yelling about the horse out of the barn, at least they serve now as some kind of brake and warning about spending where before they were pouring gasoline on the fire.
As for fiscal responsibility, Clinton was far, far better at it than “conservatives”. Except for the blow job thing, which I don’t care about, he did a very good job. Bush and his open ended wars halfway around the world was just stupid and insane. The major economic indicators under Bush are usual government figures which were blown entirely out of proportion by the war time bomb. I note that you do not dispute the $5 to $7 trillion dollar cost of the war. All of the usual indicators would have been thrown way off if these things had been put on the budget.
The Republicans believe that government is bad and cannot succeed in its objects. Whenever they get elected they prove their point. But how can anyone succeed in running a government when they are certain that government is a failure and evil? Ask any parent and they will tell you that a child who is convinced that something will fail and treats a task as something that will fail, and you will get a failure. For the Republicants to ever succeed at running government, they must first develop an attitude that they can succeed at the tasks they undertake. Any department they want to fail, will. Failure is the easiest thing in the world.
My reference was to more recent numbers, and the clear upward trend. Plus, you consistently neglected the higher numbers for underemployment and those who gave up. From 2001 to 2004 job growth did not match the growth in the labor force, though it did after 2004 which I’ll freely admit.
I wasn’t attempting to give your entire argument. Another part of it, to show I remember, was the availability of shovel ready projects. That is clearly a valid concern, and I responded by citing the existence of such projects - and stories about the stimulus package show that there are actually plenty, just as I said. States are handling the money in different ways, but none seem to be having a problem finding places to spend it. But stating that the stimulus package would not be helpful since there would be no workers to do the projects is similar to your claim that the unemployment numbers for the last few months (not the entire Bush presidency) were not bad.
This was all just speculation on why you might have rose-colored vision. a meltdown might be a bit easier to understand when friends and colleagues are vanishing all around you. That’s just being human, and has nothing to do with politics. It’s not like I’m as upset as I should be about Darfur. With proper regulation of the brand new securities we might have had a soft landing. Your government did it right. And I freely admit Clinton screwed up by signing the repeal of Glass-Steagal.
You don’t know much about California, do you? The crisis in California is due to the screwed up budget process, as already mentioned, but also one of the things most beloved by liberals - prison spending. Cite.. From 1987 to 2007, prison spending went up 127%, while education spending went up 21%.
Here is more information. It turns out the legislature isn’t the reason for the increase in spending, it is we the people.
The biggest problem is the three strikes law, which filled the prisons, and crowded them to the point where a judge forced more spending on them. Education spending has actually gone down in inflation adjusted dollars, which is why we are now 50th in education spending per pupil.
Transportation did go up a lot, but it is tiny. Social services went down. We do pay a bit more for gas, but our air is clean, and we were actually reducing gasoline use before the recession hit.
You know, more than once I’ve been ready to post something I’m sure is true, but when I look for a cite I find it is not. You might try it before you ell a Californian what is wrong with his state. Bet you weren’t aware of the contribution of prisons to the problem, were you?
It’s a little misleading using percentages like that. There’s no doubt the prison system has gotten a lot more expensive, but according to your own cite part of the reason is that Gray Davis gave the powerful prison guards union members a 30% raise. Even so, the increase in costs of the prison system amount to 4.1 billion dollars, which isn’t even 5% of the budget. According to the California Budget Summary, corrections in total is about 7% of the budget. The charts on your cite only shows the differences in increases over the last few years, not the total amounts of spending. The fact is, California’s budget has been severely fiscally imbalanced for a long, long time. Hell Gray Davis was recalled because the budget was out of whack, by a guy who promised to clean it all up - and then went on to make the problem worse.
I strongly disagree wth the three strikes law, btw. And yes, corrections spending is out of control. But also, Gray Davis paid the union guards 30% more, which helped spike costs.
You know, you have a bad habit of posting data, then claiming that it completely disproves everything else and following up by calling the other poster a liar. You should cut that out. You say that my quote you linked is untrue. Please explain exactly which part of it is untrue, because the stuff you just posted is close to being irrelevant.
As for part of the fault being the screwed up budget process and the initiative system, I never said that wasn’t part of the problem. It clearly is. But it’s also part of the way you govern yourselves. It’s not exactly a market force now, is it? So you have direct democracy to pass initiatives which grow government. It’s still a form of government, and it’s not working well for you.
Oh, there’s a few more than that. I’d say there’s about a dozen guys around here on the ‘right’ side of the board who can hold their own in a debate, and then there’s also another dozen or two who, while they have liberal leanings, are truly open minded and can take different sides in different debates depending on where the facts take them, and I admire that. Some of them are posting in this thread.
Good on you for admitting your screw-up on the unemployment figures. Now, could you address your claims that Obama is going to run trillion dollar deficits for the remainder of his time in office?
This is all quite familiar, as Mr. Svinlesha said in the other current Sam Stone pit thread. Sam has been a font of misinformation and lies since the run up to the Iraq War and the 2004 elections. There was a NASA funding claim he once made that had me chasing figures once, as I recall.
I suspect that what happened is he got his unemployment averages from some rightarded web site and brought them here without checking them himself. (I has already tried many ways to get 6.3% out of his numbers without success even before his second attempt to get it right.)
Despite the fact that in his other OP, he made claims about Sarah Palin that even he now acknowledges weren’t supported by facts, and tried a december-like feint with his lie about Obama quotes, and here his fictional numbers about Clinton’s unemployment figures, this will not change at all the number of people claiming that Sam Stone is an intelligent and rational debator who is an asset to the board.
We can start a thread about it, if you’d like. Obama says he’s going to bring the deficit down to 533 billion, but his budget is a load of hooey. His claims for economic growth are higher than anyone else’s, he assumes revenue that’s going to be very hard to achieve (for example, his revenue from cap and trade, which is going to be very difficult to pass), he assumes that growth will not be affected by new taxes, and on the spending side he’s got ‘reductions’ that are mere placeholders for unspecified improvements in waste, fraud and abuse, which are generally illusory.
I can go into details if you’d like, but I have to go to work now.
My reference was to more recent numbers, and the clear upward trend. Plus, you consistently neglected the higher numbers for underemployment and those who gave up. From 2001 to 2004 job growth did not match the growth in the labor force, though it did after 2004 which I’ll freely admit.