- Joined
- Aug 10, 2010
- Messages
- 156
- Reaction score
- 71
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Slightly Liberal
In my recent post: Tax Rates, Spending, Recessions and the Reagan Myth, I explained the history of increases/decreases as well as spending cuts as recession-fighting techniques. I showed that the benefits of Reagan and Bush’s tax cutswere dwarfed by the growth that occurred after Bill Clinton’s tax raises (note: I am talking specifically about tax rates on the top earners, as their rates have been lowered significantly over the last 40 or so years).
Conservative’s only defense has been to claim that the GOP Congress rolled back his tax increases. As you can see, they weren’t very successful.
Then Conservative went off on an anti-Obama tangent. So I showed him how much quicker the jobs stopped bleeding under Obama as opposed to Reagan. He went off on his usual rant about using BLS.gov data, so I showed him the employment numbers for Reagan and Obama for the same date span (one year prior to inauguration to one year after). It shows Obama walking into an economy that’s bleeding jobs, and this effect tapering off within a few months, and the number of jobs slowly rising (so far). Reagan on the other hand, walks into an economy where jobs are increasing. Within months, we see the economy losing jobs for the rest of this time span.
My point here was to compare and contrast the economy under Obama vs. his hero, Reagan.
Conservative has done everything he can to avoid admitting what the graph shows. His responses have been:
1-To erroneously claim that I should be including “discouraged workers. This would make sense if I were posting number unemployed or unemployment rates, since discouraged workers may or may not be accounted for depending on how the numbers are calculated. But the graph above shows sheer number of people employed (in the hundred thousands).
2- Talk about sheer number of jobs lost (as if unemployment rates were stable when Obama walked into office, and suddenly they began dropping). His numbers are not wrong, but they don’t tell the story (and he refuses to acknowledge) that this is what was already happening when Obama walked into office.
3- He continues to attempt to meander onto the subject of liberalism, government dependency, accuse me of not having a job yet, etc.
4-Whining about how Obama predicted the stimulus plan would stop unemployment from rising above 8% (he’s wrong: economists predicted this before they realized how bad things really were).
I will take this as a concession that he realizes he is wrong and would rather spend the rest of his posts diverting the conversation into other topics.
I would like to now show the alternatives many “free market” (by this I mean virtually unfettered capitalism) proponents/libertarians/fiscal conservatives have simply fail when they are tried.
I have already shown the Reagan example (he cut spending in 81 and unemployment started to rise). The graph here is compatible with the BLS graphs above.
We can also look at Hoover vs FDR.
Hoover tried cutting spending and this made problems worse. FDR’s New Deal led to actual GDP growth. The templated free market /libertarian/fiscal conservative response is to claim that Hoover wasn’t a real conservative, that he and FDR were more alike than different. Also, that FDR’s New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression.
But the data shows that there was a stark difference between Hoover and FDR.
Conservative’s only defense has been to claim that the GOP Congress rolled back his tax increases. As you can see, they weren’t very successful.
Then Conservative went off on an anti-Obama tangent. So I showed him how much quicker the jobs stopped bleeding under Obama as opposed to Reagan. He went off on his usual rant about using BLS.gov data, so I showed him the employment numbers for Reagan and Obama for the same date span (one year prior to inauguration to one year after). It shows Obama walking into an economy that’s bleeding jobs, and this effect tapering off within a few months, and the number of jobs slowly rising (so far). Reagan on the other hand, walks into an economy where jobs are increasing. Within months, we see the economy losing jobs for the rest of this time span.
My point here was to compare and contrast the economy under Obama vs. his hero, Reagan.
Conservative has done everything he can to avoid admitting what the graph shows. His responses have been:
1-To erroneously claim that I should be including “discouraged workers. This would make sense if I were posting number unemployed or unemployment rates, since discouraged workers may or may not be accounted for depending on how the numbers are calculated. But the graph above shows sheer number of people employed (in the hundred thousands).
2- Talk about sheer number of jobs lost (as if unemployment rates were stable when Obama walked into office, and suddenly they began dropping). His numbers are not wrong, but they don’t tell the story (and he refuses to acknowledge) that this is what was already happening when Obama walked into office.
3- He continues to attempt to meander onto the subject of liberalism, government dependency, accuse me of not having a job yet, etc.
4-Whining about how Obama predicted the stimulus plan would stop unemployment from rising above 8% (he’s wrong: economists predicted this before they realized how bad things really were).
I will take this as a concession that he realizes he is wrong and would rather spend the rest of his posts diverting the conversation into other topics.
I would like to now show the alternatives many “free market” (by this I mean virtually unfettered capitalism) proponents/libertarians/fiscal conservatives have simply fail when they are tried.
I have already shown the Reagan example (he cut spending in 81 and unemployment started to rise). The graph here is compatible with the BLS graphs above.
We can also look at Hoover vs FDR.
Hoover tried cutting spending and this made problems worse. FDR’s New Deal led to actual GDP growth. The templated free market /libertarian/fiscal conservative response is to claim that Hoover wasn’t a real conservative, that he and FDR were more alike than different. Also, that FDR’s New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression.
But the data shows that there was a stark difference between Hoover and FDR.