Let's face it, if Mitt Romney had won the last election you would be touting these figures not only as positive, but a vindication of conservative policies. In addition, Wall Street, who hire smart people to look at the details behind the numbers, rallied 1/2% on the day after this news broke.
Now, you try to tell us that John McCain would have had better success than Obama did, but what would McCain have done? He either would have proposed economic stimulus, the same as Obama did, or prescribe austerity -- a policy that proved to be a failure when done in Europe. What about Romney? Romney is an entitled, insulated, plutocrat who said that 47% of Americans are moochers. His policies would have been to raise taxes on that 47%, cut social spending and lower taxes on rich plutocrats like himself. None of those policies are a prescription for economic expansion. They are ideologically based voodoo economics.
While the current job gains a good, they are not great. Why are they not great? Because in the six years plus since the Great Recession began the solution is still very simple -- ECO 101 simple but only mildly tried. As
Dean Baker says, the story of this slump is remarkably simple:
While Obama got a mix of fiscal expansion (about half the size economists suggested) and the Fed instituted unconventional monetary policy, nobody proposed debt relief. This wasn’t hard or unconventional economics; it was not much beyond Econ 101. But where was the GOP on all of this? They grew a new fixation with deficits and proposed the same old policy they always propose, upper-income tax-cuts. So to pretend that the GOP has some kind of prescription for lifting the economy quickly, they only prescribe the same old medicine that proved ineffective. What did you say, 'Reagan did it?' Reagan increased the deficit, increased the number of public sector workers and increased spending -- all things that the GOP kept silent for Reagan but are up-in-arms when the Democratic President tried to do it.
2009 wasn't so far ago that we don't remember conservative claims that expansionary monetary policy would cause inflation; budget deficits will drive up interest rates and we need to reduce deficits to encourage confidence -- all while Keynesians pointed to the standard economic models, which said that money wouldn’t be inflationary in a liquidity trap, deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and contractionary policy would be contractionary.
Not only does the GOP and conservatives not have a prescription for lifting the economy quickly, their stated solutions would have made things worse.
