That’s what the Romney plan isn’t, despite the Obama campaign lies.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: The Romney stimulus:
Firing Obama alone would not come close to curing our economic problems, but it might reassure many that the White House will stop making them worse. Romney certainly believes this. Buried in all the coverage of his lamentable comments about the “47%” was this assurance: “If we win on Nov. 6, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. And we’ll see capital come back and we’ll see, without actually doing anything, we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.”
At this point, psychology might be as important as policy. If even 10% of the money figuratively sitting in mattresses gets invested once Obama is out of office, that would be a much bigger stimulus than Obama’s, and no doubt far better spent. Oh, and it would not only be better spent, it also wouldn’t be borrowed from China.
Romney has to get across the message that Obama inherited a mess, and made it much worse. It’s a powerful one, and it has the additional virtue of being completely true.
The historical rebound is likely. Obama depressed the country even before he was elected because he looked likely (it being a democrat year as some have noted.) Which suggests that those cooking the polls may actually make it worse for Obama to be elected by keeping the economy depressed.
I think it’s mostly psychological although the regulation burden is a killer too.
If the Feds cut the budget by half a trillion the economy would skyrocket. People sitting on cash would start to believe that the gubbmint is serious about solving the problem and avoiding the cliff.
“Romney has to get across the message that Obama inherited a mess, and made it much worse. It’s a powerful one, and it has the additional virtue of being completely true.”
And he could tack onto that the fact that grown-ups don’t whine or give excuses. Grown-ups attack the problems and solve it and don’t play golf or have fancy parties with Big stars in the White House until it’s done.
He could quote the general who recently said that there are no excuses in combat. You have to do it right and you have to do it right every time. Romney could ask, rhetorically, if those soldiers in the trenches should get any less from the government.
Our friends on the left understand this. It is why they are now saying the economy will improve no matter who is elected. It covers the bases.
It should be easy for Romney/Ryan to show that their tax plan can be revenue neutral without hiking taxes on households with incomes under $250k: offer as an existence proof a set of deductions that, if eliminated, would replace the revenue from high-income taxpayers that will be lost as a result of the 20% rate cut. The TPC tried to come up with such a set, and couldn’t. Martin Feldstein tried, and couldn’t. Chris Wallace asked Ryan to give it a try on Sunday, and he stalled, and then gave the excuse there wasn’t time. Bloomberg News asked him today, and he refused to answer.
The explanation is simple: no such set of deductions exists. For the first time in his career, it appears that reporters are actually asking Ryan to show his work, and he can’t.
made it much worse
During the primaries Romney often said that Obama made things worse. He seems to have dropped the line, presumably because voters don’t believe it. Nobody thinks the economy is good, but no one has amnesia bad enough to think that it’s worse.
Of course it’s worse. There are more unemployed people now than when he took office, and their income is down. In what way is it better?
And, more importantly, it’s not getting any better. Voters will forgive a bad economy if it appears progress is being made, and there is light at the end of the tunnel. So far, there is no light.
Baghdad Jim: “The economy is NOT getting worse! It’s getting better! Much better! Believe Obama, not your lying eyes!”
What’s your definition of “getting better”? GDP growth is low, but it’s positive.
1.3% GDP growth, minus our 0.9% population growth, gives a per-capita GDP growth rate of 0.4%. But many economists say the current CPI understates the level of real inflation by significantly more than one percent, so we’re probably still going backwards.
Question: Does GDP factor in time value in money? Such as devaluation of the dollar due to Quantitative Easing?
^ That was real growth rate, where the GDP is adjusted for the official inflation rate.
China reports a good GDP, but it’s vaporware. A growing GDP in an America where most of the growth is the printing of unwanted new cash, is likely the same.
There are more people employed. We are gaining jobs instead of losing them. The economy is growing, rather than shrinking. The stock market is way up, as are exports, corporate profits, energy production, etc.
We were in a recession, with GDP and employment in free fall, teetering on the brink of total collapse. Now we’re growing slowly. One of these is much better than the other.
Every month there is a lower percent of the population who are employed. That’s what happens when you “add jobs” at a rate that is lower than the number of people entering (or trying to enter) the workforce.
And the stock market is up because of fed policy. A policy of borrowing money to inject it into the economy. Currently by buying mortgage assets. A process that cannot continue indefinitely.
Rand’s assertion is that the economy is worse now than it was in January, 2009. He can cherry pick a couple indicators, the total number of unemployed and personal income, that are in fact worse. But just about everything else is better, regardless of whether it’s Obama’s doing or not. You can’t credibly blame Obama for making things worse when they are not, in fact, worse.
In particular, the first derivatives are much better. As Bart notes above, people care more about the direction and rate of change than they do about the absolute level. When Obama took office GDP and employment had sharp negative slopes; today they’re getting very slightly better. That’s a huge improvement.
I didn’t say that “the economy” was worse. I said that he inherited a mess, and made it worse. Despite your delusions, there are fewer people working today than when he took office, and their average income is down. They are worse off, and getting more so by the day (particularly given that the economy is clearly slowing, and likely heading into recession, perhaps next quarter, something that will be even more likely should the president be reelected).
I said that he inherited a mess, and made it worse.
Today’s mess is worse than 2009’s? Gaining 100,000 jobs a month is worse than losing 600,000? Really?
fewer people working today than when he took office
Not according to the latest BLS data.
Not according to the latest BLS data.
I wonder if the latest BLS was tweaked hard to undermine the Romney talking point. It’s something of a coincidence that in 2009 and 2010, there was no significant adjustment to total non-farm employment, but now there’s upwards adjustments of over 350k (which incidentally is three months of job growth in the current economic environment).
I wonder if the latest BLS was tweaked hard to undermine the Romney talking point.
LOL. Yes, the BLS is an arm of the Obama campaign (they have offices next to the part of the campaign that does polls for Fox News). But they’ve been slacking off — shouldn’t they have been reporting 300,000 jobs a month for the last year, and an unemployment rate under 6%, to ensure Obama’s reelection?
We are gaining jobs at a rate slower than new employees entering the workforce and have been for a long time.
Yes, that was true under Bush as well.
No, that wasn’t true under Bush. To return to Bush era levels of employment (Aug 2007), adjusted for a 0.899% population growth rate for 5 years, we’d have to add 10,480,00 jobs.
(I had a long comment filled with numbers based on data from the BLS, but it got lost, possibly when the new orange kitty jumped on my keyboard.)
Labor force participation rates 2003-2012+
Jan 2009: 65.7%
Oct 2012: 63.5%
Bush stats there too.
Bush added 1.1M jobs over 8 years, an average of 11,000 a month, or 0.1% job growth. Meanwhile, US population growth is about 1% a year, or 10 times as high.
From the BLS:
Employment, Jan 2001: 136,181,000
Employment, Dec 2008: 143,350,000
Employment, Aug 2012: 142,558,000
That 7.169 million jobs under Bush, not 1.1 million, giving him an overall growth rate of 0.6433% against a population growth rate of 0.899%. If you go from the start of his term till July 2007 when the housing crisis hit, the jobs were at 147,315,000, so his job growth rate over those 6.5 years was 1.2163%.
It’s -792,000 (negative) jobs under Obama if you go from December 2008. His only competition is perhaps Hoover.
If Bush was so bad and Obama can’t even get us back to where we were during the Bush years, what does that say about Obama?
George:
What BLS numbers are those? Go to the BLS Top Picks page, select “Total Nonfarm Employment – Seasonally Adjusted”, click the “Retrieve Data” button, and you get:
1/2001: 132,466
1/2005: 132,453
1/2009: 133,561
That’s 1.1 million jobs gained during Bush’s presidency, all of them in his second term (he lost 13,000 in the first term).
Labor force participation rate, Jan 2009: 65.4%
Labor force participation rate, Aug 2012: 63.7%
Number of employed, Jan 2009: 140,436,000
Number of employed, Aug 2012: 142,558,000
(the above is not seasonally adjusted)
Number of expected employed if employment grew at the same rate as population (0.899%) since Jan 2009 (1.00899^3.75)*140,436,000: = 145,229,000
Number of people who should be employed based on population growth since Jan 2009 but aren’t: 2,671,000
Number of people who should be employed to return us to Aug, 2007 (Bush era pre-housing) employment percentages: 153,038,000
Number of people who should be employed based on population growth since Aug 2007 but aren’t: 10,480,000
Fortunately most of these under-employed are women and minorities, possibly because Obama views women and minority jobs as competition for unpaid campaign volunteers. By keeping them out of the workforce he can get more Obama posters put up without relying on Hollywood money.
Revenue neutral?
We could go back to the Bush tax structure, which brought in 17 to 18% of GDP instead of Obama’s 15%. We could go back to the Clinton tax structure which brought in 17 to 20% of GDP. We could go back to the George HW Bush tax structue, which brought in 17 to 18% of GDP instead of Obama’s 15%. We could go back to Reagan’s tax structure, which brought in 17 to 19% of GDP. We could go back to Carter’s tax structure, or Ford’s, or Nixon’s, or Johnson’s, or Kennedy’s, or Eisenhowers, or Trumans, all of which brought in 17 to 19% of GDP instead of Obama’s 15%.
It’s like he’s retarded or something.
As are his supporters, apparently.
We still have the George W. Bush tax structure, plus some tax cuts.
So apparently it’s not the tax structure, it’s that Obama is just too lazy to go out there every day and bring in some revenue.
Elect a big-spending no-show community organizer (who golfs all day) as the government’s bread-winner in chief, and government income plummets and debts skyrocket. Any medieval village idiot could’ve predicted that as an inevitability, no? 😀
Obama’s solution? Demand that the few people who still have a job give him more money, faster! Then call them stingy because they’re not tossing enough $20’s in his violin case. Maybe if he had an economic model that wasn’t based on bitching, bailouts, begging, browbeating, borrowing, bragging, bribing, bamboozling, and bankrupting the bourgeiosie, the economy would recover on its own.
By the way, do you know that Jim has a bumper sticker on his care: “Cloward-Pivin in 2016”? Just thought you’d want to know.
Meanwhile, enjoy this courtesy of Instapundit:
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/ROMNEYDISTRACT.jpg
George Turner, above, points out that federal tax revenue is a much lower fraction of GDP than under all other recent presidents. And you’re complaining about how much money Obama is stealing from you?
The printing of money for phony stimulus steals the value of what money I already have.
Inflation is at historic lows. Nobody is stealing from you.
Reported inflation leaves out food and energy and is therefore a fucking lie.
Inflation at historic lows?
According to InflationData.com, inflation was lower than 2011’s for 51 of the past 98 years, and lower than the Aug 2012 level for 36 of the past 98 years.
Include 2009, 2010, and 2012. Obama is not stealing via inflation.
Reported inflation leaves out food and energy and is therefore a fucking lie.
LOL. The government keeps track of food and energy prices too. There isn’t a big conspiracy to hide that data. It just doesn’t say what you want it to say. Energy prices collapsed in 2009, because the world economy was collapsing. Then they rose, because the world economy started recovering. It’s a pretty boring story; it must be more exciting to think that the Fed and Obama are stealing your money.
Just to be clear, Jim, you don’t think that the fact that the middle class (not to mention the poor) are paying a lot more for food and fuel is a big deal? Particularly when the latter was one of Obama’s stated goals?
Because most normal people know what inflation means. It means you get less for your money. And that doesn’t change just because those particular items, which everyone has to buy, was removed from the inflation basket. It doesn’t mean that they still don’t have to buy it, and it didn’t remove it from the CPI.
The only (ostensible) reason to remove them from the inflation indicator was that they weren’t judged useful for gauging what the money supply should be. But the pain when they go up is very real, and you delude yourself if you fantasize that this will have no effect at the polls.
One of the reasons the official inflation rate is low is that home prices plummeted and the housing market hasn’t recovered, and housing is in the CPI’s basket of goods. In fact, it’s in the basket in complex and controversial ways.
CPI owner occupier wiki
Of course I’m not sure we should even include them in the CPI if nobody is buying homes. Nobody buys old Bee Gees albums and KISS 8-tracks at yard-sales, either, but we’re not pretending those are a critical part of consumer prices.
Are today’s rising commodity prices a big deal in terms of voter behavior? I don’t think so. People who spend a big fraction of their income on food and gas are feeling them, but of course those same people got the most relief when food and gas prices were collapsing. Food and gas prices are volatile, and it’s bad luck for an incumbent to have them spiking during an election season, but I think the spike would have to be much bigger than what we’ve seen to really move the electorate.
People have looked into the question of whether high oil prices translate to political trouble for the incumbent, and the historical evidence isn’t very strong. It’s definitely the case that if high oil prices trigger an economic slowdown, that will hurt the incumbent. But what we’re seeing right now is the opposite — oil prices have risen because global demand is up.
Food and gas prices are volatile, and it’s bad luck for an incumbent to have them spiking during an election season
Jim reaches for his Heinlein. Good play.
To be fair, most of Obama’s tax increases don’t kick in until Obama is no longer accountable to the people.
Oops, I meant “car.” Jim doesn’t care for anything about the State.
Amazing how much energy you all put into the stupid trolls on here.
It beats kicking the dog for relieving stress Eric. And PETA doesn’t care if we kick Jim or Chris G.
The government keeps track of food and energy prices too.
Another of Jim’s famous red herrings. So what Jim? They still took it out of the CPI for a reason. I’m going to tell you the reason. To make sure they didn’t have to pay a COLA for two of the last three years. It was pure book cooking.
The CPI is a manufactured number that has almost nothing to do with the cost of living. It’s pure politics and more so under Obama than any before.
For the CPI to be real it would only include items that can’t be manipulated like basic commodities (sugar, oil, gold) rather than the bias of bells and whistles on new washing machines.
People understand what Obama has done to our dollar which is why he’s going to lose big regardless of those other cooked books, the polls.
They still took it out of the CPI for a reason.
Who took it out? When?
It’s pure politics and more so under Obama than any before.
What has changed under Obama?
For the CPI to be real it would only include items that can’t be manipulated like basic commodities (sugar, oil, gold) rather than the bias of bells and whistles on new washing machines.
What does the cost of gold have to do with the cost of living?
People understand what Obama has done to our dollar
I doubt that many people have any opinion at all on what Obama has done to the dollar. You are extrapolating from a little slice of the Internet/media universe, which has a peculiar attachment to the idea that inflation must be a terrible problem.
When the deficit (i.e. government borrowing) soared upwards and the Fed started expanding the money supply the devotees of Austrian economics (including Paul Ryan) confidently predicted a surge in inflation and interest rates. Neither has happened. So now they’re left with bizarre conspiracy theories, blaming the calculation of the CPI, or some sort of hidden inflation, to account for the fact that their model’s predictions have utterly failed.
he’s going to lose big
Mind if I quote you on that in five weeks?
Mind if I quote you on that in five weeks?
Please do.