Labor Day: Record Job growth. S&P hits 30th record high. Obama approval among Republicans: 11%.
September 1, 2014

 
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On this Labor Day, I’ll let the video do the talking (I apologize for the low quality. Recording technology has improved greatly since I recorded this ELEVEN YEARS AGO TODAY):
 

Bush campaigns for reelection amid record bad jobs numbers. (2:48)
September 1, 2003
[flv:http://mugsysrapsheet.com/4blog/video/abc-Laborless_Day_030901.flv http://mugsysrapsheet.com/4blog/video/abc-Laborless_Day_030901.jpg 176 144]

The woman in the video that “doesn’t blame” President Bush for rapidly rising unemployment because “[the economy] was bad before he got in there” pretty much says it all. When Bush took office in January 2001, the unemployment rate was 4.2% TWO FULL POINTS LOWER than it was at the time of the video. Unemployment would hit 7.4% by the time he leaves office. (I apologize for the lack of indexes in those graphs, but they are auto-generated by the BLS.)

Now try to imagine if President Obama had inherited the same record economy George W Bush did (22 Million new jobs and a balanced budget) and turned it into a basket case in less than three years; took the country into an unnecessary war after asserting as “fact” that another Middle-Eastern nation was preparing to use “stockpiles of WMD’s” against us; stage a “Top Gun” photo op to declare that war over while soldiers were still fighting & dying looking for those weapons, only to later joke about not finding any of those weapons during a White House Correspondents Dinner following the deaths of nearly 800 American soldiers. Imagine the backlash. (Think about the Republican reaction to FOUR deaths overseas in Benghazi on 9/11/12 vs FOUR THOUSAND deaths on U.S. soil on 9/11/01.)

And Republicans cheered Bush… and gleefully reelected him. His average approval rating that year: 62.2%.

Let’s contrast this with President Obama’s record:

Inherited the worst economy since The Great Depression where we were losing nearly 800,000 jobs per month, a 3/4 of a TRILLION dollar bailout of Wall Street, a Stock Market in freefall, and turned it all around, having already created more than THREE TIMES as many jobs in just six years than Bush did in eight.

Six straight months of an economy that’s producing more than 200,000 jobs per month… the first time that’s happened since 1997… the start of the Clinton boom years. (And the Conservative response: yeah, but the numbers are “lower than expected”, “still too many people out of work” and… my favorite… “we needed that many jobs just to recover what we lost” [unspoken: under Bush].)

The S&P-500 has hit a record high… not just once, but for THE THIRTIETH TIME this year, breaking the “2,000” mark for the first time.

And President Obama’s approval rating among Republicans? An absurd 10.7%, dragging down his overall approval to just 42%.

At the height of the economic mess in 2008, President Bush’s approval rating among Republicans was “down to” 60%. The only thing one can conclude from this is that Republicans must LIKE economic disaster.
 


 

Another helpful reminder of where we were more than a year before President Obama took office:
 

Disaster Presidency: Two weeks in November 2007.

 

That was after six years of a Republican president and Republican Congress.

And if you think this current “Do-nothing Congress” (with its 15% approval rating) is bad, just imagine what the next two years will be like if Republicans gain control of the Senate and spend the next two years impeaching Obama the way they did at the end of Clinton’s presidency.

Republicans would love to credit themselves for the economic turnaround. But what actions could they point to to justify it? “Stopping Obama” via unprecedented obstruction? Two signature accomplishments they failed to obstruct… his “tax hike” and “ObamaCare”… they said would kill jobs and destroy the economy. They clearly didn’t. The deficit is shrinking rapidly and I’ve already pointed out record job growth. Republicans have done nothing, even threatening to sue the president for doing “too much.”

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, Bush & Cheney insisted that the Clinton economy “wasn’t as good as it would have been if only we had had a Republican president in charge of the Republican Congress. We gave it to him and you saw the result. Now they want you to imagine how much “worse” the recovery would have been if they hadn’t been there to obstruct everything for the past four years. You buying it?

 


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September 1, 2014 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: Economy, Jobs, Partisanship, Politics, rewriting history, Right-Wing Hypocrisy

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