Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls Poll: Which US presidential candidate do you like best?

I'm back! At least for a short time. I'll address this last post quickly as my schedule doesn't allow me much leisure time since I'm out of town this entire week.

Don't ever believe the New York Times on anything. They specialize in looking for statistics that make Republicans look bad, always ignoring statistics that make them look good. The Enquirer is a better source than the Times these days with far leftists Pinchy Sulzberger and Bill Keller in charge. Remember when the Times blew the lid off of a terrorist financial tracking program that was wildly successful? Even major Democrats tried to keep the Times from publishing. The main reason Bill Keller said what finally made him decide to do so was because Bush had ticked him off. National security was not even considered. Wow, what great journalism! Not.

What the Times always wants to ignore is that Republican presidents are usually left with an economic mess left over by the Democratic president. The first three years of the Reagan presidency were essentially the price we had to pay to get out from under Carter's misery index where inflation was over 21% and unemployment at 10.7%. The Reagan tax cuts plus the tight money policy by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker essentially saved the economy. Remember the term, stagflation? It was made just for Carter's presidency. If you discounted that part, the latter part of the Reagan presidency blew away anything that happened in the 1990's. Clinton's economy never exceeded 6% growth while Reagan's did in two consecutive years. With a much smaller population and over a smaller period of time (about 5 years), the 1980's created over 20 million jobs while the 1990's generated 22 million jobs. Reagan's 20 million also included the 2 million lost during the deep recession of 1980-83 so he had a deep hole to dig out of in less time. Reagan didn't have the benefit of being handed a nicely growing economy like Bill Clinton did.

Bush was left with the economic mess of the dot com bust. Clinton rode the 1990's by essentially doing nothing. He came close to killing the economy with his tax hike back in 1993 as he was handed an economy growing at 4.6% by the former President Bush. After his tax hike, the economy nearly dipped into recession, growing by a measly 0.7%. The next year had near zero growth. It was pure luck that the dot com boom began early in his watch, saving the economy from recession, the beginning of which strangely coincided with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995. You probably forgot that the first two years of the Clinton administration had nearly zero economic growth, most likely due to this tax hikes. But then the dot coms started up. With that kind of "irrational exuberance" of the dot com boom where stocks routinely went to $200 or more without having any revenue or profits (I know because I even bought two of them, ugh), even Carter would have looked like an economic genius with what Bill Clinton had to work with.

Then when things started to go sour in 2000 when people finally figured out the New Economy was a mirage and that revenue and profits actually mattered, Clinton didn't lift a finger and left it to his successor to dig us out of an economic hole. If Gore had won, he would have had to dig out of the same economic bust that his boss would have left him.

The Times likely didn't factor in Jimmy Carter's incompetence, the dot com boom, and the bust plus the economic factors of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Nothing similar to those happened in the 1990's. Clinton had everything going his way including the peace dividend, hard earned by the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the dot com boom. Daffy Duck would have been a "great" president then. The Times also didn't bother to mention that the gap between the rich and poor widened greatly during the 1990's as it always does in periods of economic prosperity. The growth of high tech in the 1990's further widened the gap. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that as long as everybody's benefitting. I don't blame Clinton for that at all despite his populist talk that he would narrow the gap. He didn't. Only the far left seems to care that somebody else is getting rich too.

Historically the times when the gap narrows is during the time of economic recession and depression where everybody suffers but even then, only rarely as the rich are able to weather recessions better. From those people in the study you cited, it seems the respondents would prefer recession as long as the rich didn't get richer.