Leftist talking points vs. Reality
Tuesday, June 12th, 2012The following has been passed around actively by leftist recently:
Basically, the Republican strategy for the past three years has been this:
1. Do everything humanly possible to prevent the economy from recovering.
2. Wait for 2012.
3. Run a campaign focused on the fact that the economy is lousy.
This post shows a high degree of partisanship, and an appalling low knowledge of how the federal government works and basic economic theory.
First off, for most of the past three years, the congressional Republicans haven’t been in a position to do much of anything. A position they primarily put themselves in. They didn’t control the White House, were the minority in the House of Representatives, and didn’t have enough seats in the Senate to even threaten a filibuster.
For the better part of two of those three years, the democrats ran the show. They set and implement policy, they decided where the money was coming from and how it was going to get spent. For the rest of the three years in question, they still controlled the White House and the Senate, which let them effectively block any changes the House Republicans might want to make.
The democrats, lead by Barack Obama own this economy, i.e. the most lackluster recovery on record. They are the ones who promised unemployment under 6% by now if they got enact their grand Keynesian economic plan, which they did. The results, unemployment at 8.2% (which be over 10% if the labor force participation was at the same level it was when Obama took office) and a real unemployment rate of 14.8% (according to the Dept. of Labor)
Faced with this record, the democrats want to double down of failure and continue the policies that have resulted in high unemployment and economic growth that in a good quarter breaks 2%.
There are a great deal of things you blame the congressional Republicans for. The current lack of significant growth in the economy isn’t one of them. Even Barack Obama has correctly stated that the economy was his issue and if he didn’t have it fixed in three years, he didn’t deserve a second term.