Contrary to their claims and positions, the GOP plans would increase our national debt (or eliminate all services, in the case of Ron Paul):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/report-debt-will-swell-under-top-gop-hopefuls-tax-plans/2012/02/22/gIQAzAJvUR_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines
Friday, February 24, 2012
Obama's Accomplishments
To respond to those who claim the Obama Administration has accomplished nothing:
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
10 Scariest States to Be An Atheist
Wow. I'm glad I live in the Bay Area. At least no one here overtly ostracizes me...although I'd be in their faces if they did. ;-)
http://www.alternet.org/belief/151241/10_scariest_states_to_be_an_atheist/?page=entire
http://www.alternet.org/belief/151241/10_scariest_states_to_be_an_atheist/?page=entire
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Mitt Romney’s claim that Obama said stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent
Mitt Romney’s claim that Obama said stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent
By Glenn Kessler, 4:02 AM
Gerald Herbert/AP
“Three years ago, a newly elected President Obama told America that if Congress approved his plan to borrow nearly a trillion dollars, he would hold unemployment below 8 percent.”
— Mitt Romney, Feb. 4, 2012
We had dealt with this claim more than a year ago, but we unaware that it had slipped into the former Massachusetts governor’s talking points until loyal reader Chuck Smith sent us a homemade, five-minute YouTube video challenging Romney to a $10,000 bet to prove that Obama actually ever said this. (See video at bottom of the column.)
We welcome reader contributions, especially when folks do their own research. (Smith has a separate video proposing that candidates or their aides pay a fine if their claims don’t pass muster with The Fact Checker or other nonpartisan fact-checking organizations. We like that idea.)
Since this claim is bound to crop up again in the campaign, perhaps it is time for a refresher course. (Smith notes that GOP.com also touts a similar version of this claim.)
The Facts
Interestingly, the information to disprove this claim exists on the Romney campaign Web site. Far from being anything that Obama said, the Romney campaign acknowledges that this 8 percent figure comes from a staff-written projection issued Jan. 9, 2009 — before Obama had taken the oath of office. Of course, the campaign still spins it as a negative.
Here’s what happened. Two Obama aides, Christina Romer, the nominee to head the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an incoming economic adviser to Vice President-elect Biden, wrote a 14-page report that attempted to assess the impact of a possible $775 billion stimulus package and how much of a difference it would make compared to doing nothing.
Thus, it was not an official government assessment or even an analysis of an actual plan that had passed Congress.
Page 4 of the report included a chart that showed that unemployment would peak at 8 percent in 2009, compared to 9 percent in 2010 if nothing was done. But the report also contained numerous caveats and warnings because, after all, it was merely a projection.
“Forecasts of the unemployment rate without the recovery plan vary substantially,” the report said. “Some private forecasters anticipate unemployment rates as high as 11% in the absence of action.” As Smith noted in his video, the report spoke of “considerable uncertainty” in the estimates and the potential for “significant margins of error.”
At the time, other economists had similar forecasts — Romer and Bernstein were in the mid-range — but the economy turned out to be in deeper trouble than most people thought. Even with a massive stimulus bill, the unemployment rate soared above 9 percent.
Indeed, a December 2008 confidential memo to Obama from incoming National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers — recently disclosed by the New Yorker — provides a window into the thinking at the time.
The memo warned Obama that without any stimulus, the economy was projected to “lose 3 to 4 million jobs in 2009.” (Ironically, the economy ended up losing that many jobs even with stimulus, a sign economists had not yet grasped the dimensions of the crisis.)
Summers wrote that the economic team had concluded that a $600 billion stimulus was too small and that Obama should go for something bigger. The memo then outlined four options, with the highest being $890 billion, to keep the unemployment rate from going above 8 percent.
The legislation that ultimately passed Congress was pegged at $787 billion; some lawmakers had balked at accepting any bill over $800 billion.On balance, most academic studies judge that the stimulus had a significant, positive effect on employment and growth, but some consider it to be a failure.
Romer, after she left the White House in 2010, said that the estimate of the impact of the stimulus bill was accurate but that the 8 percent “prediction was so far off” because economic conditions were so much worse.
“We, like virtually every other forecaster, failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be in the absence of policy, and the degree to which the usual relationship between GDP [gross domestic product] and unemployment would break down,” Romer said.
In any case, Obama himself never “told America” that his plan “would hold unemployment below 8 percent,” as Romney claims. This was merely a staff report about a generic stimulus package, not even Obama’s own plan.
A Romney spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The Pinocchio Test
Given that we first outlined the problems with this claim more than a year ago — and given that the facts are clearly known to the Romney campaign — it is distressing that Romney would continue hype it up into such a misleading assertion.
Three Pinocchios
Monday, February 6, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Republicans and their celebration of anti-intellectualism
Republicans have only themselves to blame
By Richard Cohen,
On Saturday night, at precisely 9:19 and 30 seconds, my iPhone, my iPad, my computer and, for all I know, my toaster were informed that Herman Cain had endorsed Newt Gingrich. The ping-ping of the devices suggested that something momentous had happened — alerts from both The Post and the New York Times — but in fact it was just additional evidence that the Republican Party has become a circus: One clown endorsed another.
It’s hard to know who is the more ridiculous figure — the grandiloquent, bombastic and compulsively dishonest Gingrich, or the beguilingly ignorant Cain, a man who has never held elective office and who was reduced to speechlessness when asked a question about Libya. Nonetheless, Gingrich, his Alfred E. Neuman grin on his face, accepted the endorsement and then went on with his nihilistic campaign for the White House. This has been an exceedingly silly political season.
But it has also been a sad one. The Republican establishment acts as if this season’s goon squad of presidential candidates has come out of nowhere, an act of God — a tsunami that hit the party and receded, leaving nothing but nitwits standing. In column after column, conservative commentators lament the present condition, but not their past acquiescence as their party turned hostile to thought, reason and the two most important words in the English language: It depends.
If you ask me what I think of abortion, I’d say, “It depends.” It depends on whether you’re talking about the ninth month of pregnancy, the first, the health of the mother, the fetus — or, even, the morning-after pill. But in the Republican contest, the answer to the question is always the same: no, no and no again. Thanks for giving the matter such careful thought.
It is the same with taxes. Should they be raised? It depends. It depends on economic and fiscal conditions — and on whose taxes will be raised and by how much. The answer cannot be “No, never.” That’s not an economic position; it is an ideological one and exhibits a closed mind.
Similarly with global warming, GOP candidates are not certain it is exacerbated by industry, auto emissions and such. They take this position not because they have studied the science but because they are opposed to government regulations. They fear the solution more than they do the problem. Some also take a skeptical position regarding the theory of evolution — proof right there that there is something wrong with this theory.
This rampant anti-intellectualism is worrisome. The world is a complex place, but to deal with it, the GOP presented a parade of hopefuls who proposed nostrums or, in the case of Michele Bachmann, peddled false rumors about vaccinations. When this started I cannot say — the late Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for his “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” in 1964 — but the embrace of Sarah Palin by the GOP establishment has got to be noted. The lady has the gift of demagoguery and the required anti-elitism, but she knows next to nothing about almost anything — and revels in her ignorance.
Should the United States bomb Iran’s nuclear installations? It depends. Should America enable Israel to do it? It depends. How should China be handled? What about Russia and Turkey, not to mention Pakistan — our ally and a mosh pit of madmen? From the GOP candidates, the answers are simple: Bomb Iran if it goes nuclear, confront China, stare down Russia and — from the unfathomably shallow Rick Perry — kiss off Pakistan. Subtlety is banished. Yahoos stride the stage.
It is entirely appropriate that last week’s GOP debates fell between “Pawn Stars” and “American Pickers” in the 10 most-watched cable television shows. They are sheer entertainment having little to do with us and our problems. The Republican Party has veered so far from reality that Gingrich is lambasting Romney as a “Massachusetts moderate” — moderation being, as it was with the clueless Barry Goldwater, an epithet. Romney, who has all but collapsed his rib cage to conform to conservative dogma, must be perplexed. Others have prudently stayed out of the race.
The Republican establishment that has now risen up to smite the bratty Gingrich has only itself to blame. For too long it has been mute in the face of a belligerent anti-intellectualism, pretending that knowledge and experience do not matter and that Washington is a condition and not a mere city. The endorsement of Gingrich by Cain was not a bulletin. It was a feeble blip on a scope. The GOP is brain-dead.
© The Washington Post Company
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