"Gunner" wrote in message
...
I'm not going to glorify the bottom-dredgings you've yanked off of some
neocon blog by answering each one, but your first one is a doozy, so
we'll
just tackle that one and let it stand for the rest:
ECONOMIC DATA CONFIRMS SLOWDOWN BEGAN UNDER CLINTON
Economic Statistics Confirm U.S. Economy Was Shrinking While Clinton
Was In Office. "America went into recession long before the terrorist
attacks of September 11th. . The new figures suggest . that the
economy grew more slowly in . 2000 than was previously thought: GDP
rose by 3.8% (compared with last year's estimate of 4.1% and an
initial figure of 5%)." ("Unwelcome Numbers," The Economist, 8/3/02)
I have a subscription to The Economist, so I just looked that article up.
It's a story about how the economy declined in 2001, not in 2000. The
quote
you yanked from somewhere in cybersapce says that GDP rose by 3.8%. For
God's sake, Gunner, that's around 0.3% higher than conservative
economists
thought was *healthy* just four or five years ago. 3.8% is an excellent
rate
of growth for an advanced economy, by any standards. All that the comment
concerned was a revision in the Commerce Dept.'s earlier estimates.
In no way, shape or form did the article say, or even suggest, that the
economy was "shrinking" when Clinton was in office. In fact, the graph
that
accompanies the article shows that GDP was growing at about 4.5% (the
revised figure, which is what the article really is about) when Clinton
left
office. You could confirm this for yourself in about ten minutes by going
to
the DoC site and checking the figures.
If you want, I'll send you the HTML version of the article so you can see
the whole thing, and the graph. If nothing else, it might give you pause
next time you pull quotes from the blogs. They're mostly full of crap,
and
you'd do yourself a favor to lay off of them, anyway.
Ed Huntress
The figures that article gave were verbatim.
No, verbatim means "in the exact words." See those little dots in your
original quote? They should be three dots each, ellipses, which is where
they took words *out*.
In fact, the article in The Economist makes a very different point from the
one that your quote tries to squeeze out of it. It says the economy slid in
2001, not 2000, and the revised growth figures for 2000 are almost an aside.
Once again, the growth rate at the beginning of Bush's term was 4.5% -- an
excellent rate of growth, one that conservative economists would have
considered "overheated" as late at 1995, before they realized how to have
that much growth without inflation. (Hint: it's in the money supply, which
is what made Greenspan look like a genius for so long.)
And any figures sited by
the DoC before the elections is subject to the spin put on it by the
Clinton administration. Short term bonds, etc etc are all part of
that spin.
Gunner, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't learn economics
from incidental reading online.
The growth of the economy was the result of the Dot Com
bubble expansion in your figures, and shortly thereafter..It popped.
Much of the "surplus" was projected income , primarily from Capital
Gains taxes that never materialized due to the bubble busting. Which
is one of the reasons that California is in so damned much trouble.
They spent a "projected" surplus that failed to materialize, and when
the time came to pay the bills..the money was not in the kiddy.
California is not the US (thank God). Your theory about the "bubble" is a
bunch of hogwash. Explain for us, please, why manufacturing employment
increased during the bubble, and why capital investment in manufacturing was
going like a house afire. For starters, remember that the investment in
manufacturing was being financed by debt, not by equity, so don't try to put
a stock-market spin on it.
Do you consider Insight Magazine a Blog?
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/i...id/158410.html
What the hell does that have to do with the article from The Economist? The
article your URL points to is a polemic that most legitimate economists
would take with a fat grain of salt. Capital for dot-coms dried up, in the
analysis of most economists, because they weren't showing a profit and it
was becoming increasingly obvious that they weren't going to.
I do tend to browse around the net, on diverse subjects that catch my
fancy. Hell..Ive got not much else to do, while waiting for the phone
to ring.
If you want to get serious about economics, read books, not the Internet.
Do you have any comments on the last cite, from 1999, warning of the
impending trouble?
I noticed your failure to mention it.....
I didn't even read it. As has happened before, I started checking your
"cites" and found that the very first one was an out-and-out lie, so I
didn't waste my time with the rest. That's become an unpleasant pattern with
your extensive quotations...from sources you never read.
You just cut and paste somebody else's collection of polemic and bull****,
and then challenge everyone to refute it. Well, I just did. I went back and
read the original article. Your very first quote was bull****, and you
probably had no way of knowing that one way or the other. That's not the way
to become informed.
Ed Huntress