“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana; color: #333333;”> Give conservatives credit: They have a loud echo chamber. It usually begins with a lie, then the rest of the right-wing crowd are off to the races. The most recent example is the assertion that President Obama made the economy worse. That point was advanced in a
“font-family: Verdana;”>Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and, briefly, George W. Bush.
“mso-bidi-font-style: italic;”>She wrote, collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren’t his fault. But through his decisions, he made them all worse.” Fox was quick to amplify what is certain to be a GOP campaign theme in 2012. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News: “And I think you can argue strongly that the Obama administration made it worse.”
“font-family: Verdana;”> On his Fox show, Bill O’Reilly argued that to “say the Obama administration has not made it worse” is “to just ignore the statistics.” In fact, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (in a report issued last month on the effectiveness of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) noted that Obama’s economic stimulus plan had helped local and state governments by raising federal matching funds under Medicaid and increased funding for transportation projects. The stimulus program also provided tax relief for individuals and businesses, increased business write-offs and helped people in need by extending and expanding unemployment benefits as well as increasing benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps. According to the CBO, the stimulus program had the following effects in the first quarter of 2011: Raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product between 1.1 percent and 3.1 percent Lowered the unemployment rate between 0.6 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points Increased the number of people employed between 1.2 million and 3.4 million Increased the number of full-time equivalent jobs by 1.6 million to 4.6 million compared with what would have happened otherwise The Center on Policy and Budget Priorities, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C., noted that economic activity as measured by inflation-adjusted gross domestic product was contracting when the financial stabilization bill known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were enacted. Since then, however, the economy has grown for seven straight quarters. Media Matters, the watchdog group, observed: “Economists also agreed that the stimulus was effective. A March 2010 study in the Wall Street Journal
said the stimulus ‘boosted growth and mitigated job losses.’ ABC
News reported on February 18, 2010, that most of the economists on
its panel thought the economy ‘would be worse today without the big
aid package.’ And a February 2010 survey of 203 members of the
National Association for Business Economics found that
‘eighty-three percent believe that GDP is currently higher than it
would have been without the 2009 stimulus package.”
Those are the statistics that Bill O’Reilly chooses to
ignore.
Perhaps we should send O’Reilly and the folks at Fox News the
lyrics to Sunshine Anderson’s “
“font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;”>Heard it all Before” “font-family: Verdana;”>:
ya lies…But your lies ain’t working now.”
George E. Curry, former
editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, can
be reached through his we site,
“http://www.georgecurry.com/”>
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“color: blue;”>www.georgecurry.com
