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Townhall...
The
Four
Lies About the Economy That Obama Needs Voters to Believe
by Larry
Elder
Jun 07,
2012
President
Barack Obama’s re-election turns on his ability to convince voters that
1)
Obama inherited a “Great Recession,” 2) every “independent” economist
supported
the “stimulus,” 3) “bipartisan” economists agree that Obama’s stimulus
worked,
and 4) as actor Morgan Freeman puts it, racist Republicans say, “Screw
the
country ... we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man
outta here”
-- nothing to do with deeply held policy differences.
That’s a
lot of merchandise to push.
1) Take
this “Great Recession” business.
Remember
the “misery index”? The term, popularized by former President Jimmy
Carter,
used to mean inflation plus unemployment. Unfortunately for John Kerry,
by the
time he ran for president in 2004, the misery index stood at 7.4 midway
into
the election year, the same as when George W. Bush won the presidency
in 2000.
What to do? Change the definition. Kerry invented a new misery index,
one that
included only high-rising costs like college tuition, health care and
gas
prices.
Similarly,
“bad economic times” used to mean, above all, high unemployment. Within
a year
of Obama’s presidency, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent. Within
three years
of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment reached 10.8 percent. Under Obama,
inflation has been -- at least so far -- rather modest. Early in
Reagan’s
presidency, inflation reached 13.5 percent. Rather than describe this
era as
the “Great-Recession-turned-around-by-Reagan’s-pro-growth-policies,”
many
pundits and scribes dismiss this period of extraordinary growth as the
“me
decade” or the “decade of greed.”
2) “There
is no disagreement,” said then-President-elect Barack Obama, “that we
need
action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start
the
economy.”
What?! More
than 200 economists, including several Nobel laureates, signed on to a
full-page ad placed in major newspapers by the libertarian Cato
Institute.
Eventually, over 130 more economists became signatories to the ad.
It read:
“With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true. Notwithstanding
reports
that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big
increase
in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that
more
government spending is a way to improve economic performance.
“More
government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United
States
economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government
spending did
not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph
of hope
over experience to believe that more government spending will help the
U.S.
today.
“To improve
the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove
impediments to
work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a
reduction in the
burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost
growth.”
These 350
or so notable economists notwithstanding, Obama later doubled down:
“This is
what independent economists have said -- not politicians, not just
people in my
administration. Independent experts who do this for a living have said
this
jobs bill will have a significant effect for our economy and for
middle-class
families all across America. And what these independent experts have
also said
is that if we don’t act, the opposite will be true. There will be fewer
jobs;
there will be weaker growth.”
3) Obama
surrogate Steve Rattner recently said that Obama’s stimulus worked --
as
confirmed by “bipartisan” economists. As proof, Rattner offered the
findings of
“bipartisan economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder,” who “agree that
... we
would have had unemployment substantially higher than what we’ve had
over the
last two years.”
“Bipartisan”?
Blinder, a
Democrat, served as a member of the Clinton administration and later
advised
presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry. As for Zandi, he did
serve as a
presidential campaign advisor to John McCain. Like Blinder, Zandi is a
self-described
Democrat.
Zandi likes
“maverick” McCain, a Republican who voted against the first George W.
Bush tax
cuts using the same left-wing argument about the cuts benefiting the
rich.
Zandi’s man, summoning his inner Dennis Kucinich, once said, “I cannot
support
a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate
among us at
the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.”
As to the
alleged unanimous expert opinion on the effectiveness of Obama’s
stimulus,
Stanford economist John Taylor debated this on NPR with Zandi. Taylor’s
analysis, shared by many other economists: “I just don’t think there’s
any
evidence. When you look at the numbers, when you see what happened,
when people
reacted to the stimulus, it did very little good.”
4)
Democrats never tire of trotting out Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell,
who said his “single most important political goal” was to make Obama
“a
one-term president.” Horrors! Why, doesn’t this just make McConnell the
very
personification of sinister! Republican opposition for the sole purpose
of
bringing down Obama, the first black president, yada, blah, etc.
Apparently,
it is outside the brain capacity of people like Morgan Freeman to
understand
something: One way to defeat bad, leftist Democrats’ policies is to
defeat bad,
leftist Democrats, who seek to implement those bad, leftist policies.
It’s not
complicated.
Nothing
personal.
Read this
and other articles at Townhall
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