Politics, Government & Public Policy: May 2012 Archives
The Tax Foundation has a fantastic resources that let's you investigate how many tax paying households migrated into and out of every state over the past two decades. You can also see how much adjusted gross income moved with the household. The big winner? Florida, with households earning more than $105 billion per year moving in since 1993. The losers? New York lost $79 billion, and California lost $51 billion. Per year.
VDH describes how the economic goalposts have been moved for Obama.
We have had 38 months of 8% plus unemployment. We are setting records in the numbers of Americans not working and the percentage of the adult population not employed. GDP growth was a pathetic 1.7%. The borrowing hit $5 trillion under Obama, who between golf outings and campaign hit-ups of wealthy people, adds $1 trillion plus each year in more debt. To question how to pay it back is to pollute the air or abandon the children. In 2005, Paul Krugman was writing why Bush's spending was going to crash the economy; in 2012, Paul Krugman is writing why Obama's far greater deficit spending, on top of Bush's debts, is not going to crash the economy, given that we need to borrow far more than our paltry $3 or $4 billion a day.In 2004, the media's "jobless recovery" was the description of George W. Bush's 5.4% unemployment rate. "It's the economy, stupid" referred to George H.W. Bush's 1992 annual 3.3-4% GDP growth rate. "Unpatriotic" was W's $4 trillion in borrowing in eight years, not $5 trillion in three. If Obama right now had 5.4% unemployment, 3.4% economic growth, and a budget deficit of about $400 billion, what would the media call it--a job-full recovery, "it's not the economy, smarty," or patriotic borrowing?
Hopefully the electorate notices. Couldn't Romney use these stats and history in a speech?
It does seem that the "even Jimmy Carter" would have killed Osama meme is pretty unfair to the ex-President. When Iran was holding 53 American hostages in 1980 Carter made the (ultimately disastrous) decision to send Delta Force in to rescue them. It ended horribly, but not for lack of guts on Carter's part.
