NBER still dates recession to March 01 - so Bush is a liar - or do we

[papau]

accept that Bush can force the movemement of the job of dating the recession from the NBER to his political appointees on the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA)?

By the way -This is an excellent flash animation on Katherine
Harris and Florida, take a look
http://www.bushflash.com/gta.html

http://www.nber.org/

On July 31, 2002, the BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis) released revised figures for gross domestic product that showed three quarters of negative growth in 2001-quarters 1, 2 and 3-where previously the data had shown only quarter 3 as negative, but left the 4th quarter of 2000 - Clinton's last quarter - positive.

The head of the 7 person recession dating group called NBER, Zarnowitz, has been quote in our right wing media as saying he will look further at the data, but thinks now that "the recession started maybe November or December 2000 and lasted to November of 2001", while also stating that he was speaking for himself and not for the committee. Indeed a spokeswoman for the NBER has said there was no plan "at this time" to change the date of the recession, and shrugged off the White House's assertion that the slump began earlier. Zarnowitz said he does not know when or if the committee will meet to make an official decision on a change.

However, by definition, a recession is 2 or more quarters of negative GDP growth. The truth is that GDP growth was positive during Clinton's last quarter in office.



The NBER panel picked March 2001 as the beginning of the recession primarily because that was when U.S. payroll employment peaked and then began to drop seriously. The NBER's other three measures of economic activity don't support a March start date. Industrial production has been falling since October, 2000, while, except for an attack-related drop in September, business sales were about flat since late 2000, and all the while real incomes were still growing solidly. Indeed without 9/11 there was not enough change, per the NBER, to cause a need to suggest a recession had started.

But now the Bush lies start. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4262420/
President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, chaired by Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, is trying to get away with ...revisionist history. The CEA's Economic Report of the President, released Feb. 9, unilaterally changed the start date of the last recession to benefit Bush's reelection bid. Instead of using the accepted start date of March, 2001, the CEA announced that the recession really started in the fourth quarter of 2000 -- a shift that would make it much more credible for the Bush Administration to term it the "Clinton Recession." In a subsequent press conference, Mankiw said that the CEA had looked at the available data and "made the call."

This simple statement masks an attack on one of the few remaining bastions of economic neutrality. For almost 75 years, the start and end dates of recessions have been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research , a private nonpartisan research group based in Cambridge, Mass.

While there have been complaints over the years, this arrangement has been accepted by economists, government agencies, and politicians -- until now. "For the first time, the federal government is intervening in the process," says Robert Hall, an economist at Stanford University and the conservative Hoover Institution who since 1978 has chaired the NBER panel of seven prominent economists who make the actual decision. The NBER's decisions have been dragged into the political arena before, but without impact. In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the NBER to combine the 1980 and 1981-82 recessions into a single downturn that could be called the "Carter Recession." During the '92 election season, the first Bush Administration kept hoping that the NBER would announce that the recession of 1990-91 was over -- a statement that didn't come until December, 1992.<snip>

BUT WHY DOES OUR MEDIA NOT CALL BUSH ON HIS LIE ABOUT A CLINTON RECESSION? IS OUR MEDIA RIGHT WING GOP CONTROLLED?

Indeed does the media even look at economic data before they accept the Bush lie that increased corporate profits will lead to jobs?


Increased corporate profits do NOT lead to jobs as the above chart shows as it plots the annual change in the GDP estimates of corporate profits (the horizontal axis) against the annual change in full-time employment over the following 12 months (the vertical axis) for each quarter since 1947. If increasing corporate profits led to increasing employment there would be an upward slope in the data points (as it is, the 'best-fit' regression line has a downward slope - increasing profits have tended to lead to a fall in employment). Of the six largest increases in employment, four followed declines in profitability - of the six largest falls in employment, three followed increases in profits.

Why is the press not screaming to bring Clinton and Rubin and the rest of the team back? Why is the media allowing Bush lies in ads to go on without comment - if only a few comments on the business page, if the editorial page is unavaliable because it must be pro-Bush/GOP 24/7/365?

[Diogenes2]

1. The economic recession began...

precisely at that moment when the reality finally sunk in that the election had been stolen & Bushco was at the helm. March 2001 sounds about right.

[displacedtexan]

2. And they omit the huge surplus that existed then.

Remember when * said we had plenty of $ for his tax cuts?

[54anickel]

3. Bushco is so obsessed with this blame Clinton, blame the Dems BS

yet they ignore the world crumbing around them. Do they really think anyone is going to care when looking back on his tenure whether or not the recession also started under his watch?
History will not be kind to this maladministration.
It's like that story of the guy obsessing over the splinter in his friends eye while he's got a friggen log stuck in his own.
Sheesh! :eyes:

[Festivito]

4. I was wondering how they did this.

Out of Clinton's 32 quarters of 2-6% growth, one quarter was -0.5%, which occurs just after an unusually high 6.5% growth, and just before a 2% growth.

That's when Bush takes over and starts three consecutive GDP losses each worse than the preceding.

Blaming Clinton for going below by 0.5% in the same year he hit his highest growth rate of over 7% is rediculous. Additionally to claim that that particular -0.5% was the start of the recession is even more rediculous. Then using the first quarter of which Bush owns 2/3 going down by a quarter percent as Clinton's fault is at best questionable. But, the next two are Bush's and they double in worseness each quarter under control of only the Bush.

Rediculous.

[stevebreeze]

5. The real point is, not when it started but what was done to end it

Clearly Bush helped accelerate the slide into recession with his talking down the economy immediately after the election, but the real issue is how ineffective Bush's economic policy's have been in bringing us out. It is hard to imagine anyone doing a worse job.
:kick: