Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Purely Symbolic

by Tom Bozzo

Price of unleaded premium gas, 4/12/06, University Ave. and Speedway Rd., Madison, Wisconsin: $2.999.

Yield of 10-year Treasury note, COB 4/12/06 (per the Vanguard web site): 4.98%.

(BTW, it's kinda amazing how the "economic boom" has tax revenues pouring into federal government coffers, eh?)

Just in case you were worried that the sociologists were taking over... ;)
Comments:
note that tax revenues were up substantially, it's just that GWB forgot to control gov't spending.

The economy is booming, Tom! Hello!
 
Bryan, you're missing some subtext here. The WPE attributes everything good in the world to the tax cuts. Were he not, ahem, creative with the truth about tax cuts, we should be running the biggest surpluses ever!
 
Note also that tax revenues (job growth, other cyclical macroeconomic variables) all should be up from their recession troughs. Can't take credit for natural cyclical variation, now, can we?

I also would be remiss if I failed to point out that the recovery has been substandard in key respects, notably the pace of job creation.
 
Man, you've got GWB now. The economic boom has been substandard in some places.....

I agree with you that GWB probably deserves little credit for the current economic growth, but he also might not deserve blame for the lackluster performance of the economy in his first term. Regardless, it seems you want to point out little negatives in the economy and blame them on GWB when jobs, growth, profits, etc. are all up.

I've said all along, the way to take down GWB and the Repugs with him is to chant "deficit, deficit, defict, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq." That's a can't lose strategy, unless you start blaming him for a minor problems in an otherwise good economy and then people will think that your side isn't serious....
 
(I deleted Bryan's duplicate comment.)

I think the dissatisfaction that is registered with the economy is legitimate. GDP growth doesn't mean much to an individual. Jobs growth is OK (though it should be/have been much better through the recovery), but wages and wealth haven't been, so lots of people rightly feel like they're losing ground. Unless they start to join in the "boom" being enjoyed mainly by people much better-off even than me, that's a big font of dissatisfaction with the course of the country to tap. I don't know if "deficit" serves as a catch-all for the burn-the-candle-at-both-ends policies.

As for Iraq, well, yes, though Democratic strategists need to get a backbone transplant on that one.
 
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