Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Obamanomics: The Numbers Don't Lie

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Posted by Dan Cirucci at 12:14 PM

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1 comments:

Ryan said...

And how many of these silly charts about "numbers don't lie"--which both sides can crank out ad nauseum by cherry picking whatever numbers and using whatever ranking system they want--did we see here in 2008 pointing out the abysmal failures of Republican leadership? No, Mr. Bush was not running, but Mr. McCain's campaign proposals were far closer to the failed Bush policies than Mr. Obama's.

So the argument is essentially that Mr. Obama didn't fix the train wreck fast enough, ergo we should go back to what caused the wreck?

If "numbers don't lie," the numbers show the Bush tax cuts to have failed in job creation. By GOP logic, since federal taxes have not increased under Obama, job creation should have been reaching the stratosphere. But...well, that didn't quite happen.

Then there's that whole sudden adherence to paying as you go, that the GOP only discovered when the...you know, THAT guy of questionable origin and with the funny name....current President was sworn in. Launching a bogus war on fraudulent "intelligence" about non-existant WMDs with no funding...that's A-OK. But heaven forbid we consider for a moment helping the unemployed maybe feed their children without cutting some other social program. Yes, indeed, it's those evil retirees scraping by on Social Security and daring to need medical care that are the problem with the deficit, and not, let's say, a trillion dollars over in Iraq.

All of those pesky facts aside, the comic nature of that "chart" is best expressed in the "global competitiveness" line. It's perhaps the most meaningless and laughable one there (and that's saying something). By what convoluted logic had this country not long since fallen behind in competitiveness long before Mr. Obama came anywhere neat Washington?

I know for some people the simplistic, simple-minded "are you better off now than four years ago" question works. Some of us are still more capable of understanding that there are actually more complex ways of examining things. Such as whether a return to failed policies represents the best chance to improve said situation, or whether something better, something worth achieving, is not always achieved in a short time period when the "fall" was so pronounced.

January 25, 2012 7:05 PM

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