Free Republic

MEMORANDUM FROM: BC'04 POLICY DEPARTMENT Senator Kerry has repeatedly tried to talk down a growing economy by focusing only on the most pessimistic of statistics and ignoring the remarkable recovery of an economy that experienced the shocks of the stock bubble burst, recession, terrorist attacks, and corporate scandals. The irony is that the same statistics Kerry campaigned on in 1996 are the same he rails against in 2004. As BusinessWeek recently reported, "On many of the key variables that voters care about, the economy looks uncannily like it did in the summer of 1996, a year when the incumbent was...

MEMORANDUMFROM: BC'04 POLICY DEPARTMENTIntroductionJohn Kerry is traveling the nation on his misery tour, inundating voters with his pessimism about America's economy.  What voters may not realize, however, is that the growing economy that Kerry continues to talk down is remarkably similar to the economy Bill Clinton touted during his 1996 reelection campaign and that Kerry speaks of in glowing terms.  Unemployment was 5.6 percent in May 1996, the exact same level as it is now.  The average monthly payroll growth from January to May 1996 was 233,000 jobs, and from January to May 2004 the economy created an average...