Truth and Science and Facts vs. Unwashed Hillbillies

And so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does [sic] not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared, and they [sic] have good reason to be.

A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won't be recovered.

"'The public view of the economy is at odds with the facts, and the blame has to go to the Democrats,' said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm that conducted the nationwide survey. ‘It does not matter much if you make change, if you do not communicate change.'"  

It's absurd. We've lost our minds. We're in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don't weigh in. It's all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics.

Source:  St. Louis Fed/FRED, GDPC96 and PAYEMS series.

• 9/11.
• A Democrat-controlled Senate during the 2001-02 part of the recovery.
• The 2001 "recession" was not even a recession by many criteria. (See in the above chart, for example, that real GDP in that recession was higher at the so-called "trough," or end of the recession, per the NBER, than at its beginning peak.)
• Once Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate in 2003, the final Bush tax cuts were passed. They were signed into law in May 2003, or eighteen months into the recovery. Jobs started increasing that August. In the four years after those tax cuts, virtually all under Republican Congresses and budgets, 7.8 million net new jobs were created. Not just saved, but created. Net.
• You go ahead, Mr. President, and tell us that you have found one post-war recovery even slower than yours in job growth: George W. Bush's. "Communicate change," as the Bloomberg expert advised.

I think it's important for us to bend the cost curve [down], separate and apart from coverage issues, just because the system we have right now is unsustainable and hugely inefficient and uncompetitive.

Tapper: "... CMS study from February predicted a 6.1 percent increase, and now post-health care 6.3 percent.  So it seems to have bent it up."

Obama: "No -- as I said, I haven't read the entire study.  Maybe you have.  But -- you know, if -- if you -- if what the reports are true, what they're saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that's going to increase our costs, we knew that.  We didn't think that we were going to cover 30 million people for free.  But that the long-term trend in terms of how much the average family is going to be paying for health insurance is going to be improved as a consequence of health care.  And -- and so our goal on health care is if we can get instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it's going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we've made huge progress."  [My emphasis.]

• The Troubled Asset Relief Program did not relieve troubled assets, but paid for the government to buy and run two car companies and take over 90% of the home mortgage business. There will be about $50 billion that went to the car companies and federal housing programs that will never be paid back. (The banks, however, will pay back with interest.)
• The $814-billion stimulus did not stimulate. Instead, it was followed by the poorest recovery and one of the two or three slowest recoveries in postwar history. And it did not do what Obama and his experts predicted it would do for unemployment.
• The health care reform that was supposed to bend the cost curve down actually bent it up.
• These fixes that fixed nothing will only help us go broke quicker.
• Sure, Obama has not raised tax rates -- yet. But he and the Democrats in Congress are doing everything possible to see that all of the tax rates that Bush reduced in 2001 and 2003 go up dramatically -- just two months from now.