Not a freaking chance in the world.
Three years and seven months into the Obama administration, there’s no longer any reasonable doubt that we’re living through the worst presidential exercise of economic stewardship since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s rabid progressivism known as the New Deal locked the Federal Reserve-created, Herbert Hoover-enhanced Great Depression into place for eight additional years. In 1932, the year before FDR was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 23.6%. In 1940, it was still 14.6%. In between, it never fell below 12%. The economy only recovered because of the military build-up required to win World War II.
I heard Kruger on NPR on Friday – spouting his “Recovery” claims without any pushback from the hosts.
The media is doing its best to floss the narrative to a fine sheen.
Today, as Mort Zuckerman accurately contended in a Friday evening Wall Street Journal op-ed, “we are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression,” where “dependent millions” relying on food stamps and swelling the disability rolls “are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s.” Zuckerman, James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, and Amy Payne at the Heritage Foundation have accumulated separate litanies of awful statistics, largely focusing on deep drops in labor force participation and sharp increases in discouragement. Collectively, they completely repudiate Krueger’s and Solis’s aforementioned recovery assertions.
Read the whole thing.
And make sure your less-informed friends, relatives and neighbors read it too.
Well, this is plainly wrong. Why only last week, Dog Gone at Penigma linked to a CBS article full of graphs showing that every day, in every way, the economy under President Obama is fine now and is getting better and better. Plus, we all know certain super-duper Fact Checkers wouldn’t say anything that wasn’t completely true (in which the word “true” is not so much defined as “can be verified by independent observation” as “advances the narrative”).
Quit trying to harsh their mellow, dude; it’s just uncool to the max.
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Krueger is a “labor” economist. That is his academic specialty. Real economists don’t consider labor economists to be real economists. They are advocate economists, that is, they are concerned with pushing certain policies, not the nuts and bolts of supply and demand curves, monetary & fiscal policy, etc.
Krueger got into a bit of trouble because he published a paper that showed that raising the minimum wage in NJ did not reduce employment in that sector of the economy. This was the equivalent of a physicist publishing a paper showing that public policy could affect the law of gravity.
More reputable economists discovered that the actual payroll records showed, as expected, a decline in minimum wage workers when the minimum wage was increased. How did Krueger get his data?
He didn’t use payroll records, he used a telephone survey of employers. This produced data that is not only unreliable, it is impossible to replicate.
But Krueger was paid to produce a study that showed that increasing the minimum wage did not reduce employment, so that’s what he came up with.
Krueger is Obama’s chief economic adviser.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4509
http://epionline.org/studies/epi_njfastfood_04-1996.pdf
It seems that some are doing better….
In the most telling part of Bill Clinton’s DNC speech Wednesday night, he asks the swooning crowd, “Are we doing better than we were four years ago?”
The delegates yell, “YES!!!”
#SEIU #NEA #LeftistActivists #GovernmentEmployees #Bureaucrats
“Are we doing better than we were four years ago?”
Does not have the same meaning as:
“Are we better off than we were four years ago?”
Depends on who you ask. I just finished reading hundreds of responses to this type of question from people who now have health insurance under their parents (new law up to age 26), due to Obamacare. Some had pre-existing conditions (diabetes, history of cancer, etc) and had no other way to obtain affordable insurance. They all, without exception, claimed they are better off than they were before Obama took office (and the ACA passed). Several even wrote that this had saved their lives, allowed them to continue therapies and medications they woudn’t otherwise be able to afford, and saved them from personal bankruptcy.
So . . . it’s highly subjective. “Better off” means different things to different people.
And maybe if those early 20s folks had jobs they wouldn’t need to be on their parents’ health plans. Some others their age would also love to be on their parents’ health plan…if only their parents had jobs.
The problem with 20s folks is that most of the jobs they can secure no longer come with health insurance. Part-time, retail, and contract jobs do not give benefits at all. For many these are the only opportunities available, and yes, tying health care insurance to employment is a problem for workers of all ages.
So let’s see, the demographic least likely to need insurance now has it (sometimes), but there are four million fewer jobs than in September, 2008.
Way to go Obammy!
“I heard Kruger on NPR on Friday – spouting his “Recovery” claims without any pushback from the hosts.”
Pushback? Pushback? This is NPR. They are human baffles for any sort of liberal noise. Anything discordant echoed on their airwaves is directed into the large vacuous space between the hosts ears – where the discord fades into a white noise.
InSanity, my father can no longer see his Doctor due to insurance changes since the ACA was passed. Don’t worry though it isn’t like cancer is serious. He can just take a pill.
jpmn – this is the first I’ve heard of anyone having their healthcare restricted as a consequence of the new legislation. Can you provide more detail? Which provision is it that actually restricts access to healthcare? I’ve not seen or heard this anywhere else. I did talk to someone a week ago who said that she was grateful to Obama for cutting COBRA cost for the unemployed, and it meant that she and her husband could afford health insurance after he lost his job a couple years back (a man in his 50’s, let go so that company could then hire a younger, cheaper replacement).
I’m wondering what Romney’s plan (if he is elected and he repeals Affordable Care Act) is to make sure healthcare is affordable and accessible to the 6.9 million people between ages 18-26 who now have insurance coverage due to ACA. He is short on details of what he would implement to replace ACA, and that’s a problem for him.
Isn’t 26 a bit late for cutting the umbilical cord?
Easy: 6.9 million jobs in a healthy economy so they can pay their own way. It’s sad you can’t see that.
You say it is “easy”. If it were easy it would have been done by now. The easy, obvious stuff gets done, no matter who is leading. And, if the solution were easy, Romney would be crowing that solution at every campaign stop. He’s not. In Massachusetts, when he was governor, the solution was universal, mandatory insurance for all, so isn’t that the easy solution?
Socialism makes things “easy” for those that recieve the proceeds from those that write the checks. It’s near the point where that’s a 50/50 split. When we hit the point where there are more check recipients than check writers we as a country will be truly be decending into the abyss. Putting folks back to work is the only way out, and that doesn’t mean by more gov’t jobs, that’ll just hasten the decline (more check cashers), it’ll require private sector opportunities.
“Well, the truth is, there are simple answers, they just are not easy ones.”
– Ronald Reagan –
Sanity, I don’t know what exactly caused my Father’s previous employer to change his insurance. I don’t know if it was Medicare or his supplemental insurance that caused the Mayo clinic to no longer see him.
I do know that he has had to change Doctors since the ACA passed. I also know that my Father is a great deal more real to me than your 100’s of anonymous 20 year olds.
And InSanity get ready for a great deal more denials if Obamacare isn’t repealed.
” I don’t know what exactly caused my Father’s previous employer to change his insurance.”
So, not related to ACA (?)
“get ready for a great deal more denials if Obamacare isn’t repealed.”
Because ???
My take on ACA is that more people are getting access to healthcare as a result, not fewer . . .
“Sanity” said:
“If it were easy it would have been done by now.”
Well, it certainly could have been done by now, but it hasn’t happened.
President Barack Obama doesn’t say or do many things that inspire consumer confidence, much less employer confidence. He says things like “pay your fair share”, which we all take to mean “more”. So, should they plan to produce more so he can take it? No.
“the solution was universal, mandatory insurance for all, so isn’t that the easy solution?”
Only if you have an unending supply of money. We don’t.
Sometimes you hear that the individual mandate was a Republican idea.
Bull shit: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-02-03/health-individual-mandate-reform-heritage/52951140/1
It is yet another myth the libs tell themselves to make themselves feel superior.
Conservatives and the GOP have long recognized the problems with paying for health care in this country. Every proposal put forth by conservatives, from allowing national competition among insurance companies writing individual policies, to government coverage for catastrophic medical expenses, to HSA’s, has been opposed by the statist Democrat party because they work to diminish the demand for single-payer, state-rationed “health care”.
We have previously (8/27) established that Sanity does not understand how insurance works, or what the difference is between health insurance and health care.
There is no mind to be changed here, so my suggestion is – don’t feed the troll.
Hoover and Bush are the real heroes!
“Hoover and Bush are the real heroes!”
Surely, when compared to Wilson, Carter, and Barry.