Posted on 01/31/2006 6:13:23 PM PST by liberallarry
"Who founded EPI?
EPI was founded by a group of economic policy experts that includes Jeff Faux, EPI's first president; economist Barry Bluestone of Northeastern University; Robert Kuttner, columnist for Business Week and Newsweek and editor of The American Prospect; Ray Marshall, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas-Austin; Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at Brandeis University; and economist Lester Thurow of the MIT Sloan School of Management."
Not one of these clowns is a real economist with any genuine intellectual heft. That list is a joke.
Now there's an objective bunch. </sarcasm>
I'll remember this if we ever experience "sluggish private job growth" in America again.
If the economy is "sluggist" after the tax cuts, how would these pointy headed fools account for the increase in the amount of taxes collected.
It does not "indicate" any such thing.
With the economic hits of high oil prices and climbing interest rates, there may very well have been job LOSES and recession if the tax cuts had not kept money in buyer's pockets.
They write this article like nothing special happened twixt 2001 to now.
What a bunch of bull. We'd be in a recession if it weren't for the tax cuts. This economy has survived a steep increase in oil prices, not to mention natural disasters.
Supporters of these tax cuts have touted them as great contributors to growth in jobs and pay. But, in reality, private-sector job growth since 2001 has been disappointing,
Gosh, I wonder if anything happened between 1999 and 2002 to interfere with job growth that somehow isn't mentioned in the article... like the dot-com bubble burst, the corporate scandals, the worst terrorist attack in history targeting the nation's economic heart... nah, that can't have anything to do with it.
Predictable liberals... actual growth in the face of those enormous obstacles, and it simply isn't enough... and more government spending is the answer.
Utterly moronic.
Who cares? Ad hominems won't cut it as a refutation of facts or ideas.
Not one of these clowns is a real economist with any genuine intellectual heft
One could say - with quite a bit of justice - that no econmists have any genuine intellectual heft. But Kuttner and Thurow are good.
But all this is irrelevant. The article is simple as could be; All job creation since Bush took office can be fairly attributed to increased government spending. The tax cuts - which mostly went to wealthy individuals - contributed nothing which means that the beneficiaries of the cuts didn't think investing in job creation in America was a good idea.
Wrong or right? Supporting evidence?
It's all been downhill since the housing bubble burst five years ago.
The fallacies in this article are in the conclusions, not the statistics.
If Liberals had it there way, they'd increase government spending by redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. No jobs will have been created, and a great deal of the money given to the poor will end up in China.
Defense spending is one of the few legitimate expenses for the Federal Government. It does in fact create jobs, and it produces actual real products and services. Social spending produces very little and results in no new investments.
The very first number cited by the article is probably the tax revenues that would've been collected over the last 4 years, assuming that the degree, breadth, and scope of the economic recovery following 9/11 had nothing to do with the tax cuts. This is a fallacious assumption and a disingenuous attempt to disconnect the economic recovery from the very real effects of the tax cuts on the sales of durable goods.
Even if a lot of the jobs created were government jobs or related to government spending, it doesn't cause the economic recovery to cease to exist. Tax revenues are growing at a faster pace than their pre-tax cut rates. The tax burden has shifted more heavily onto the wealthy and the well to-do with the middle class and poorer citizens paying a smaller portion of the total tax pie than before the tax cuts.
This reminds me of that NYT's economist... What's his name? The one who writes all the books full of facts and statistics, but when it comes to writing his conclusions and his interpretations, the facts and stats go right out the window and he basically paraphrases the Socialist Party. He's required reading in some University of Hawaii economics classes.
That's the key all right. But in whose pockets? Counter-cyclical tax cuts and government spending increases are standard Keynesian economics. But these are supposed to be middle-class tax cuts which stimulate private spending. Large tax cuts for wealthy individuals were supposed to stimulate business investment (and job creation). The authors argue that they didn't.
This article is so full of wrong information that it pathetic. The writer still believes in the failed Keynesian economics.
I'm thinking of a hurricane that begins with a "K."
Government spending hurts the economy. It never, ever helps it. Any dollar that you pull out of the economy and put in the public sector hurts our economy,and it is as simple as that.
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