Re: 2/3rds of Registered Voters Think Obama's Policies Contributed to Economic Downt
From the rabidly-right-wing New York Times and CBS:
It is, of course, worth noting that a larger percentage of voters continue to blame Bush's policies as having contributed to the Economic Downturn. But, given that I am one of those voters, I'm not sure how much opportunity that gives to the Obama campaign to make headway on these numbers by trying to draw connections between Romney and Bush.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we are going to continue to hear all about how Romney is a Mean Old Rich Guy Who Wants To Hurt The Middle Class To Help The Rich. 'Cause running on a record like that is suicide.
This analysis was very good.
This is the wonderful economic recovery Barack Obama has planned in four years for America.
Remember, in the Soviet Union, everyone had a job…
“They pretend to pay us…and we pretend to work” was a common political joke at the time. The planners were in charge of everything…until they planned it all into the ground. More people contributing value to a marketplace — ceteris paribus — should mean more ideas, more competition, more division of labor, more goods, more services and generally, more wealth. Less “need” for government, in other words, not more. Of course, that’s rarely ever the case…and “more government” is almost always the reason why.
Perhaps, then, spending as a percentage of GDP is a fairer method? Some models show that, under these parameters, President Clinton had the lowest relative spending of the above mentioned presidents. During Clinton’s last year in office, US GDP was about $10 trillion. Expenditures that year, in 2000, were estimated to be a tad over $3.2 trillion: a 32.6% spending-to-GDP ratio. Using the same method, in 2010 US GDP was measured at roughly $14.5 trillion.
Expenditures, under Obama, came in at just over 40% of GDP…the highest level for all the presidents mentioned in the graph, and only the second time it surpassed 40% since WWII (the other year being 2009). In any case, these levels are a far cry from the single-digit percentages that were commonplace up until 1918 (when the spending-to-GDP ratio jumped from 9.5% to over 22%.)
But again, it’s all junk science. GDP is so obviously a fraudulent metric (as we’ve explained in these pages before), it’s embarrassing to think anyone (outside the government) uses it at all. Take, for instance, the expenditure method for calculation, which looks like this:
GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports).
As you can see, government spending is actually counted as a net positive when calculating the size of the economy. If the government were to simply pay all the economists in the nation to shave one another’s beards, the expenditure method would register an enormous increase in GDP…even though the overall economy might be no better off at all. Think misallocation of resources (perhaps debatable in this example), widespread malinvestment, vast diminishing of the dollar’s purchasing power, academics pinheads wielding straight blade razors…etc., etc., etc…
That the government can create value is, to continue our metaphor, the baldest-faced Keynesian lie of them all. At best it can redistribute it…all the while watching it atrophy, whittling away in their bureaucratic distribution pipelines and misguided, make-work programs.
To be clear, the above list of presidents houses no heroes for this editor. Just crooks, shysters and politicking pony paraders varying only in degrees of waste, market distortion and outright theft. A graphic portrayal of marauding pirates “dividing the loot.”
After a quick meme search of our own, we found the following cartoon which, we feel, more accurately depicts the situation in Washington, DC. Swap the candidates around if it makes you feel better…the result is still the same.
source: A Look at Government Spending Beyond the Numbers
A Look at Government Spending Beyond the Numbers
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