Job growth by President - trust the trend
Expect excessive linkie-linkie to my local daily for a while. I just re-subscribed (after a year of thinking there was life after a daily newspaper and being wrong) to the Herald-Tribune, a fine paper that is about half of what it was just a few years ago. But even in this world of smaller and smaller papers, the Trib managed to grab another Pulitzer Prize this year for an exhaustive investigative report on Florida’s property insurance system – which legislators have refused to address (multi-part story here). Like I said, a fine paper.
I want to share a Letter to the Editor from today’s paper. The writer says it well.
Bad economic ‘solutions’
In the 1920s, the Republicans ran the country and we had the Great Depression. In the 1990s, President Clinton raised taxes to reduce the deficit and not one Republican voted for this program, but lots of them predicted an economic catastrophe. Instead we got unparalleled growth.
Then came Bush and, without any concern for long-term solvency of Medicare, Social Security, etc., those in power cut taxes, especially on upper incomes. And even after incurring huge wartime expenses, they never made any effort to roll back the tax cuts. The Republicans in Congress went along with every bit of this deficit spending, and we got the great recession.
These same “experts” now want to hold the country hostage to a refusal to raise any taxes. They tell us that raising taxes on the rich will slow job growth, but never acknowledge that job growth was far better when that tax rate was higher. Nor do they accept study after study showing that these tax cuts have the least stimulative effect on the economy. Cutting spending only to balance the budget will be a disaster, leaving us less educated and less healthy. Yet this is what these economic illiterates propose. The question isn’t only why their solutions are harmful, not helpful, but, why, given their record, anyone listens to them.
That’s about right. I will add that the bald-faced lie that extending the Bush tax cuts will lead to jobs creation, is just that. A bald-faced, evidence supported, lie. After the were signed into law, all we did was lose jobs. But let’s not let facts get in the way.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
Can I point out that Medicare and Social Security are payroll taxes, and come out of MY paycheck? I did not see those taxes get cut…And the great recession came as a result of the housing collapse (compounded with high fuel costs). The housing collapse came out of irresponsible lending encouraged by the vaunted government institutions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government was encouraging, rewarding, and driving banks to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. These programs were concieved under Carter, pushed under Clinton (I remember the news stories personally), and warned against by Bush and McCain, to name two, but poopooed (I just wanted to get poo into this). Let’s look at the unemployment rate before the housing collapse, shall we? Then let’s look at the job creating juggernaut that is Obama and the rates over his tenure…
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Can I point out that Medicare and Social Security are payroll taxes, and come out of MY paycheck? I did not see those taxes get cut…
The Republicans are the party that cuts income taxes on the wealthy every chance they get. Payroll taxes are different because they’ve already “baked in” upper limits on those taxes. However, as far as payout on the benefits goes, the Greed Over Principles party has every intention of NOT paying us the money we have already paid in, as Ryan, Cantor, et al have made abundantly clear.
And the great recession came as a result of the housing collapse (compounded with high fuel costs). The housing collapse came out of irresponsible lending encouraged by the vaunted government institutions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government was encouraging, rewarding, and driving banks to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. These programs were concieved under Carter, pushed under Clinton (I remember the news stories personally), and warned against by Bush and McCain, to name two, but poopooed (I just wanted to get poo into this).
And so you have, royally. Conservatives have been called out on this lie so many times that most have actually stopped repeating it. In reality:
1) There NEVER was any law that said mortgages were to be given to people who could not afford them. The Community Reinvestment Act (or any other law) NEVER forced Fannie or Freddie to make loans they didn’t want to. If they made any bad loans, it was because they expected a healthy profit. And Fannie Mae was no “vaunted government institution”, it was privatized before the 1970s.
2) The GOP pushed “home ownership for all” as much as Democrats. Remember George Bush’s “Ownership Society”? The notion that Bush “warned” against laws that didn’t exist in the first place is a complete fantasy.
3) The Community Reinvestment Act applied ONLY to banks and thrifts, which wrote no more than 20% of all subprime mortgages issued. The other 80% were written by independent mortgage companies, subject to little or no federal oversight, and driven by nothing other than pure greed. How does this fantasy law of yours explain the demise of Countrywide?
4) Mortgage payment defaults by individual homeowners in 2007 triggered the crisis, but the sheer size of it was caused by the snowball effect of massively leveraged debt held by issuers of (unregulated, thanks again to the GOP) credit default swaps, which at the time had been written in an amount equal to 10 times the size of the entire global economy.
Let’s look at the unemployment rate before the housing collapse, shall we? Then let’s look at the job creating juggernaut that is Obama and the rates over his tenure…
So you’re comparing unemployment rates before the crisis began to unemployment rates while the crisis is ongoing, neatly bypassing the rate during the time the crisis was ongoing and Bush was still in office. A typical piece of incoherent conservative doublethink if there ever was one. If you’re going to cherry-pick unemployment rates, why not use the number of US wars prior to 9-11 to demonstrate Bush “maintained the peace”?
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I don’t understand how poor people vote for these guys either?
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They hear what they want to hear, end up believing it, and that is how these guys win elections.
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Don – check out Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas”. He asks the question – why do so many people vote against their own economic self interests? And they do it enthusiastically!
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You don’t raise taxes when the economy is bad because that will stifle the recovery. And you don’t raise taxes when the economy is good because that will halt the prosperity and destroy the economy.
There is only one time that you should raise taxes and that’s when Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter are all aligned and there is a full solar eclipse, viewable from the island of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea in western Africa.
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On the third Sunday of the last month of a leap year.
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Actually guys, that’s every other leap year. You’re welcome.
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You gotta be careful when you correct Ben. You know he shoots first and asks questions later. Kind of like Dick Cheney 😉
Just kidding Ben, please don’t tear me a new one 🙂
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Ben doesn’t scare me – he plays tennis you know and that’s really very gay.
🙂
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Moe, you are one classy dame. 🙂
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There’s one thing better than political rhetoric … and that is changing one’s own past rhetoric to fit the present. Besides, the GOP does not get the “raising revenue” side of balancing the budget.
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As in, ‘we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”
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