Originally Posted by Django
I won't pretend to be qualified or knowledgeable enough to assess the data and assertions you have presented here. I'll leave that to the economists to work out.
To be perfectly frank, I think perhaps you
are pretending to be "qualified" enough to assess the data. If you didn't believe you were, would you really be stating -- several times, no less -- that he doesn't deserve the credit?
Originally Posted by Django
1) The recession has been carrying for a couple of years at least. It may not be as long as the Great Depression, but it was long enough to do a great deal of damage.
This simply isn't true. It is my understanding that the word recession is an economic term with a precise meaning, and does not merely refer to any period in which growth is less rapid than the period before. Under the actual definition, the recession was quite short. Slow growth, in other words, does not constitute a recession.
More importantly, though, is the fact that it didn't do a "great deal of damage" by any reasonable standard, unless you are intent on ignoring our economic history. As I alluded to in my last post, the exaggerative claims about the economy are stunningly short-sighted. You'd think we've always lived under 4% unemployment and 5% annualized growth with the way people were crying foul. I guess you can thank Reagan and Clinton for spoiling us all.
Originally Posted by Django
2) I'm not sure you understand my point regarding inventories. I'm not sure I understand your point either. What I said was that inventories were vastly overstocked following Y2K in anticipation of a panic situation. As a result, production was on the decline for awhile. I believe this factor contributed to job layoffs, which, in turn, negatively affected consumption, and so on and so forth. Now that inventories have been depleted, it seems that production is on the rise again.
Ah, I see. My mistake; I thought you were using this to explain the surge in growth. The clarification is appreciated.
Originally Posted by Django
3) I'm not sure if tax breaks necessary compel businesses to expand and grow and employ more people. I think that growth comes about as a response to demand. If the demand is down--the economy is recessive--I don't see growth happening. Tax breaks may make a little more money available to a business, but hardly enough to justify widespread re-employment of a workforce. On the other hand, if the economy is expansionary, if production is on the rise necessitating a larger workforce in anticipation of high levels of demand, businesses will start employing even if it means running up a short-term budget deficit. So I don't think your point is valid.
I couldn't disagree much more. This is an echo of your previously stated demand-side view of economics, which I'm afraid doesn't hold any more water now than it did when we discussed it months ago. The demand is there. People always want things, but don't always have the money to act on their desire. Most get their money through employment; employment provided by businesses. Ergo, a climate friendly to business is a climate friendly to hiring.
If there's one single economic principle that everyone here should be able to agree on, it's that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. This has been more or less empirically demonstrated. The only potentially valid gripe against them is that a certain base level of taxation is needed to provide various social services, or that certain tax cuts may unfairly target certain income brackets. But there shouldn't really be any debate as to whether or not they do, in fact, increase overall growth. They most certainly do, as the chart provided in my last post helps to illustrate.
Originally Posted by Django
4) I can't comment on your chart, because I'm not aware of the sources. All I can say is that I know for a fact that the stock market went down in a major way in the latter part of 2001, especially following 9/11, and has only begun to recover in the last 6 months or so.
The source is Economy.com -- it's a simple chart generated from raw economic data. I can send you the numbers themselves, quarter-by-quarter, if you like. I welcome you to verify it.
As for the stock market: it took a bit of a downturn around the middle of 2001, but almost totally rebounded (over 10,000) around the end of the year. The big drop came in the middle of 2002, when it sunk to roughly 7,600. You're right, however, when you say that the recovery has taken place primarily over the last 6 months, as
each of the last two quarters has seen a job of roughly 800-900 points.
That's neither here nor there, though, unless you can show that the drop in mid-2002 is somehow Bush's doing, or that the growth in the last quarter is not. So what of it? Is the GDP surge that immediately followed his first tax cut a coincidence?
Originally Posted by Django
I read it on the internet, at a pretty reliable source. I will, in due course, dig up that source and present it before you.
While you're almost certainly telling the truth when you say you read it on the Internet, I don't believe you are when you say you read it from a "pretty reliable source," because it's
already been debunked. I wouldn't feel too bad if I were you, however...like your claim about the Veterans, you're not alone in being duped by this one.
Caitlyn gets points for identifying the fictional institute from memory.
