Are things Really better? Recovery? Follow

To be fair, putting me second worst in spelling to Tailmon probably isn't fair to to tailmon. The other aspects of Grammar aside from that whole spelling thing, I am actually not horrible about. Smash should proably be somewhere on that list too though.

To be correct. I've started using E-spell for the past 6 months. Of course my other laptop is lacking it and I do misspell. Most times I really don't care about spelling. It gives the spelling police something to do.

Jophed,





Is this more indication that the economy is secretly recovering?


See how I did that? I actually use evidence, not some radical dc political hacks op-ed piece, to prove my theory.



http://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/02/20/gas.prices/index.html




Edited, Feb 21st 2011 4:17pm by varusword75

Evidence of what? Your complete lack of economic understanding regarding gas prices or basic literacy? Well, you got me there.

Edited, Feb 21st 2011 3:54pm by Jophiel

Joph,



In no small part due to Obama's complete failure in the ME. See what happens when you bail on your allies, Egypt & Israel.


You're d*mber than I suspected if you didn't think Obama's capitulation to the muzzies in the ME over the last year wouldn't have a negative effect on the economy.


Oh and still waiting for you to post some stats that aren't coming from radical dc hacks.

varus isn't in favor of democratic rule, period. He's a fan of theocracies, as evidenced by his insistence on rule by Baptism. Especially theocratic puppet governments that will oppress their own populace, as long as they continue to sell us cheap oil.

He should move to Saudi so he can be in the front line to oppose the next set of demonstrations by people looking to free themselves from a dictatorial regime.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say: Are you suggesting that things "only got worse" during the Bush administration, and now have "only gotten better" during the Obama administration? A more accurate assessment would be that things got worse, then got better, then got worse again under Bush, and then got much much worse under Obama. I'll point out again that by the same yardstick used to measure "worse" when Bush was president (unemployment and deficit), Obama is much much worse, right?



And do you think that people also don't blame the Obama administration for the fact that things continued to get worse after he took office? I will fully grant you that quite often the reasons people blame politicians for things going on around them are not the correct ones, but if we're going to talk about who "the people" blame for something, we kinda have to take that into account, right?



An even more clear pattern emerges when you correlate the economy with which party controls congress and how much they control it (simple majority, super majority, white house held or not, etc).

Yes. But not the one you'd hoped for.

And before you cry liberal, this analysis was done by a conservative-libertarian leaning high level pentagon official with a PhD in Science/Engineering who really likes applied weapons systems.

Ummm... what?

Don't tell me you don't know the answer?

Huh? A liberal blogger claims that his anonymous friend at the pentagon is an "independent with libertarian biases". That's not remotely the same as the "conservative-libertarian" label you applied. And we're taking the whitewashing words of a liberal blogger for this. Let me go out on a limb and suspect that the source is far more liberal leaning than suggested, but that the left sees value in portraying such things as "unbiased". Saying it doesn't make it so.


And if we ignore the label and look at the report? OMG! Everything about that, from the way the data is formated, to the choice of indicators used, to the way some data is just left out because it doesn't fit the conclusions the author quite obviously wanted to come to, screams liberal bias.

"Obama is excluded because he took office with the economy in the toilet, which always drives up the deficit in the short term"

Really? That's objective data analysis? Wow... And Obama is excluded from every single graph except one: "Increase of per-capita GDP". Um. What a coincidence that we're only given data for Obama's first two years in the one category in which those numbers look good. Of course, they look good *only* because of the very factor that data is claimed to be excluded in the quote before. Right after the economy falls into the toilet, you're going to have a high GDP growth rate because it's already artificially low. Yet, the author doesn't hesitate to include the good numbers while leaving out that bad.


But you bought the line that this was unbiased? Holy hell!

In case you are wondering, this is relevant because with the exception of two years in the early 90s the the first two years of Obama's term, we have to go all the way back to the late 70s to find a time period when Democrats controlled 100% of the government. I'll also point out that this is not what I was asking for. The data is still being expressed in terms of terms of presidents.

What I'm looking for is a graph in which we chart various economic indicators across terms in which Congress is controlled by one party or the other. So break it into 1 year time periods, not 4 year presidential terms. For each year calculate the percentage to which one party or the other controlled things, and graph it against economic performance.

When you do that, you'll find that our worst performing years were in the late 70s, the early 90s, and the last four years, with the last two being the worst of the worst. When the Dems controlled congress and the White House the economy has stagnated and suffered. When power is shared, it's done well. And the brief period of time when the GOP held both houses and the White House, while we didn't do as well as when the power was more split, we did much much better than we've historically done while Democrats controlled the whole thing.

Edited, Feb 23rd 2011 3:10pm by gbaji