GOP Lying Talking Points for the 2012 Election (Collect the Whole Set!)

This was originally titled “Mitch McConnell is a Dolt (You Lie! Edition),” but I thought this title would be more search-worthy.

That Sen. Mitch McConnell — GOP leader in the Senate — is a partisan hack almost goes without saying.  But he’s now chimed in on the Senate Floor with the new Big Lie from the Republicans — that not only did the Stimulus plan in 2009 not help (“Not one single job!” was the previous falsehood), but that it actually made unemployment worse.  How that happened, he doesn’t explain, but he includes it in a few paragraphs of prevarication that are almost breathtaking in their faux talking points:

And we also know this: the economic policies this President has tried have not alleviated the problem.

In many ways, in fact, they’ve made things worse. Gas prices are up. The national debt is up. Health insurance premiums are up. Homes values in most places continue to fall. And two and a half years after the President’s signature jobs bill was signed into law, 1.7 million fewer Americans have jobs.

So, I’d say that Americans have 1.7 million reasons to oppose another Stimulus. And that’s why many of us have been calling on the President to propose something different tonight. Not because of politics. But because the kind of policies he’s proposed have failed. The problem here isn’t politics. The problem is policy.

Let’s look at these points one at a time, because not only is the new GOP talking paper, each blurb is basic enough that I guarantee you will hear the above statements so many times over the next 15 months you’ll be muttering them in your troubled sleep.

“Gas prices are up.”

This, of course, is largely out of hands of any US economic policy.  Look first at the cost of crude oil:

So, over the past five years, world oil prices have gone up and down, but have trended up. World oil prices have been going up, in general, since the Obama Administration began, but not through any policy decisions one way or another.  The US (short of, ahem, invading oil producing countries) has very little effect on crude oil pricing.

Compare that to gasoline prices:

You can see that US gas prices mirror World Petroleum Prices.

How could we immunize ourselves to that effect?  I guess the “economic policy” that Mitch wants is to “Drill, Baby, Drill,” but any reasonable amount of increased oil extraction would be a literal drop in the bucket.  The US produces 8.5 million barrels of oil a day, currently, 1.5 million of them offshore.  That’s 10% of the world’s production, or a third of what the Middle East produces.

But we consume 23% of the world’s supply, or 230% of what we produce, about 19.7 million barrels per day.  Does anyone think it likely we can more than double our oil production domestically (or increase it by 13x if we look just offshore)?  Or that doing so wouldn’t end up with further major environmental degradation and related problems? We’d be better off by far (and more likely to succeed) trying to reduce our consumption (through conservation and through shifting our power demands to things other than petroleum).

The worst I can say here is that the Obama administration has not done a lot to solve the problem, but that’s largely in the face of GOP opposition and not a lot that it can do on its own. Obama’s hardly responsible for making things worse.

“The national debt is up.”

Um … so what?

And if that’s a sign of economic policy failure, I have to wonder where Mitch has been the past three decades or so …

That’s not to say that willy-nilly spending is a good thing — but spending to jumpstart an economy that’s shedding jobs is, in fact, pretty standard economic fare.  Tax cuts don’t reduce debt; jobs reduce debt, and tax cuts don’t necessarily equate to job growth.  As we’ve seen the past decade or so.

“Health insurance premiums are up.”

Also in the news, Dog Bites Man!

As you can see, health insurance premiums have been going up for decades in this country.  I don’t recall Mitch haranguing Dubya about it on his watch.

But what, one might ask, about Obamacare?  While there are some early steps going on with the Affordable Care Act already, many of its provisions don’t kick in for another few years, by design (and through negotiation), so any effects it will have on health insurance premiums aren’t likely to be seen until then.  Yes, I’m not thrilled by that, but I don’t blame Obama (too much) on it.

As to the most obnoxious item on the graph above, that Workers’ Contributions to Premiums are way up … well, I suspect Mitch would be the first one to be screaming if Obama proposed a law to keep that from happening.  I also suspect he’s not all that concerned about the underinsured that the ACA would address (in a way that the free market has failed to).

“Home values in most places continue to fall.”

Yes, remarkably enough, with a stagnant economy, stagnant jobless rates, and banks continuing to foreclose on people as fast as their robosigners can scribble a false date at the bottom of the paperwork, housing prices are still down.

That trend started in 2006, I believe.  Was Mitch declaring Dubya and the GOP a failure for declining housing prices?

I agree that the Obama Administration could have done more — much, much more — to tackle this problem.  The problem is, it’s all stuff that Mitch (and the rest of the GOP) would have had a stroke over: debt forgiveness, debt assumption by Federal agencies, rate negotiations in court, actually punishing banks and lenders and rating agencies for cooking the books on loan quality and loan “investment” package soundness, etc.  Indeed, for all the relatively weak beer of financial reform that the Obama Administration did manage to push through, it was over the struggles of the GOP (Mitch included), who have done their darnedest since then to gut those reforms or keep them from taking place.

Don’t blame housing price declines on the Obama Administration, Mitch.

(One might also consider the number of economists who think part of the fall is not bad times, but a housing market that remains overinflated, esp. when American wages are stagnant or in decline. Neither of those are stats I think Mitch would want to actually discuss, let alone lend credence to.)

Regardless — there are millions of empty homes out there, with nobody with jobs who can afford to buy them.  That’s why housing prices are still tumbling.  I seriously doubt Mitch has any counter-proposals to magic that away.

“Two and a half years after the President’s signature jobs bill was signed into law, 1.7 million fewer Americans have jobs.”

This was an echo of Bill O’Reilly the previous night (an amazing coincidence, I’m sure): “Massive government spending has only increased unemployment – from 7.8% when Mr. Obama took office to 9.1% now.”

As Twain commented, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.  In this case, Mitch and Bill fall into the latter two categories.  To wit:

Note that lovely upward slope running through 2008.  You know, the year the Great Recession started, while the GOP held the White House and House.  That 2008.

Not surprisingly, that curve continues into 2009.  Because, remarkably enough, the President can’t wave a magic wand upon taking the Oath of Office and turn a crumbling economy around by Day 2.

And, in fact, note that the rate does level off, and then even drops a bit, through 2009 and into 2011.  Because that whole Stimulus package?  It actually did a nice job of putting the brakes on the free-fall, even if it wasn’t enough — and wasn’t followed up enough — to actually significantly reduce unemployment. For which I blame both the Obama Administration and the GOP.

Which brings me to the next graph.

So, again, we have the nadir of job loss, month-by-month, occurring at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009  … at which point, the Obama administration starts to get policies in place and stimulus packages passed.  And, hey-presto, things start to turn around …

… through the early part of 2010, at which point, matters begin to stall.  What happened?

What we see is that, until the most recent months, there’s been a strong growth in private sector jobs (you know, the “good” jobs that Ayn Rand would approve of).  But there’s been a big cut in public sector jobs (federal and state workers, first responders, teachers, that parasitic sort of thing).  The Stimulus ran out, and state governments in particular, reliant on Federal stimulus funds (like Rick Perry’s Texas) — and after the Tea Party victories in the 2010 election — cut back on payrolls.

So there’s been decent private sector growth, offset by reductions in government employment spending.

And so, the past few months, job growth has been largely flat.

Of course, Mitch, and his TP cronies, will argue that public sector jobs aren’t “real” jobs.  That they are often unionized. That they are parasites on the taxpayers. That we’d be better off without them.  Sure, that means people losing jobs, but, somehow, they aren’t “real” or “important” jobs.

Which begs the issue of why, if jobless rates are flat because public sector layoffs are matching private sector hiring, Mitch is so frenetic in his criticism of Obama.

But, then, Mitch is a political hack, whose official political goal is to make Obama a one-term president.

Which is why we should give his doltish proclamations  just the weight they deserve.

(via AmericaBlog)