Freeptards are crowing over the economy.

[Cary]

Anyone have good data, arguments, or articles to throw in their faces?

[bullimiami]

1. whatever. for most of us the economy sucks ass.

for the few bush buddies that are swimming in gold from our taxes it is GREAT.

the world has sucked since bush and friends stole it from us.

[PunkPop]

2. If the economy's so great

why are so many dissatisfied?

http://www.pollingreport.com/right.htm

Looks like the freeptards are in the minority. I know, I know, like you didn't already know that.

[applegrove]

3. An economy kept going by military spending nobody has payed

for yet. Yes - government spending does get the economy going. But with WAR - you have nothing to show for it unlike if you spend it on education.

So you have nothing to show for the war. And you have not paid for it. Yippee!

[nyhuskyfan]

4. Deficits, deficits, deficits...

They are crowing that the deficit is less than it was expected to be, but it is still a huge deficit. They inherited a surplus and completely gutted it, and the deficit would be even larger now if they didn't just conveniently not count the money spent in Iraq. Our national debt is now about 5 percent of our GNP --or significantly more than our growth.

They are crowing over 3 million job creations, after losing jobs their first term. Clinton created 23 million in eight years. The 3 million they have recently created still puts them 20 million behind.

They are crowing over a stock market that is hovering right about where it started when Bush took over. The Dow almost tripled under Clinton.

[punpirate]

5. Yes...

... just tell them to save their money, because they're going to need it. If they argue, tell them to figure it out for themselves.

[idlisambar]

6. the current account deficit (the trade deficit) is the key

U.S. current account deficit continues to grow to record high

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) announced today that the current account (the broadest measure of the U.S. deficit in the trade of goods, services, and payments to the rest of the world) reached an all-time high of $780 billion in the first quarter of 2005, an increase of 15% over the fourth quarter of 2004. The deficit reached 6.4% of gross domestic product (GDP), also a record level. The U.S. dollar has declined 14.9% since the first quarter of 2002 (as shown in the black line of the following graph). The rapid and continuing growth of the current account deficit, despite the sustained decline in the dollar since the first quarter of 2002, is a major sign of weakness in U.S. traded goods industries. Unfortunately, the deficit is still likely to get worse in the near term.



http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_20050617

[Ganja Ninja]

7. Let's see if Bush can balance a budget and still have an ..

economy that ran as well as Clinton's. If he wasn't spending like there was no tomorrow half the country would be unemployed. It's one thing to have an economy running well in war time when your spending money at a record pace. Try doing it and balancing a budget at the same time.

[dbonds]

8. They believe in Don't tax and Spend.

Seems like I remember quite a few kids in college getting in credit card trouble for this very thing. And not all had rich families to bail them out. Some people never learn.

[mpendragon]

9. a nearly jobless (or lesser jobs) recovery

Jobless numbers don't really count trading a good job for a scraping by job. Stock prices, corporate profits, and unemployment numbers don't tell everything.

[AJH032]

10. look at it this way

Bush is driving our federal budget into a huge deficit, but our economy is not yet experiencing the downside of the deficit. The fed is not raising interest rates at a very fast rate to slow inflation, and the massive government spending is helping to create jobs and boost consumer demand. This can't hold up. Sooner or later (probably sooner) the deficit picture is going to force the fed to boost rates, and once that starts happening, investment will go down, and our economy will slow. Any price deflation that CAFTA might bring will be negated by higher inflation in our economy, and hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost at the same time. The economy is recovering, for now, but this is not a stable recovery by any means, not with the deficit growing so much. This recovery just isn't sustainable for very long. Contrast that with the recovery we saw under Clinton which was very strong because it was accompanied by (and perhaps even caused by) deficit reducing tax measures which did no real harm to the economy. Bush's policies will catch up with us. Also, I forgot where I read this (possibly epinet.org), but the job growth of the current economic recovery is lagging far behind previous recoveries, so it's really nothing to crow over.

[AX10]

12. But when will this occur? IF it's going to happen, let it come in time...

for 06'.

[Iriemon]

11. Easy to make the economy look good borrowing $600 billion a year.

Govt reveneus 2004 were about 1.9 trillion and the Govt borrowed $600 billion. It will borrow about the same this year. Any organizational entity can look like its doing great if it borrows a third of its total revenue. That is not that tough -- until it comes time to pay the bill.

It takes real talent to have a growing economy while borrowing less -- a real star to do it while paying off debt.

[area51]

13. nazis crowing over economy

I can't wait until they're fired from their jobs ... that's when they'll find out that we're in a Depression economy, b/c there's very vew jobs, & what few there are pay shitty wages.

[bemildred]

14. They are fools. Why argue? nt

[delete_bush]

15. No data, but intuitively one should be able to understand

that our standard of living is not increased by spending money on the military. A one million dollar cruise missile is not a consumer product and is eventually destroyed.

Military spending is necessary at some base level but aside from some parallel advances in technology that can be transferred to the private sector it is nothing more than a national insurance policy.

Setting aside for the sake of discussion the borrowing issue, instead of spending $300B on this war we could have written a check to Detroit for the production of 12 million, $25,000 automobiles and then given them away in a national lottery. Pretty good odds of winning, and those that did would have the extra money not used on purchasing a car to spend in their local economy, creating more income and jobs. Not to mention the automobile companies/workers and the downward supply chain.

This is simplistic, of course in this scenario you could purchase a basket of different items, not just cars, or give the money away or whatever but I like the lottery concept because people relate to it.

The point is that regardless of how well the economy appears to be, what we as consumers are really measuring is our overall standard of living, which would be exponentially better without the war (or tax cuts for the wealthy, etc). And arming ourselves to the teeth only produces the same increase in other countries (China) so the insurance policy only gets more expensive for the same amount of coverage. And no one can successfully argue that we are safer because of this mis-guided adventure, it could have been done much better for far less.

[unblock]

16. crude oil has gone up, what, 150% since coup2k? since when is that good?

well, of course, it's fantastic if you're a domestic oil producer.

but throughout our entire industrial history, low oil prices have always been key to a sound economy. the banana republicans understood this full well when carter was president. isn't it conveeeeenient how forgetful they become when their guy is in power?