Krugman: Democratic Booms

[n2doc]

Everyone in the Republican Party knows that Reagan presided over an economy that has never been equalled, before or since. When I was on TV with Rand Paul, he confidently declared

When is the last time in our country we created millions of jobs? It was under Ronald Reagan …

Of course, it’s not true:


There was an even bigger job boom under Clinton than under Reagan, and Obama has now presided over three years of fairly rapid job growth, with the most recent year the fastest since the 90s.

…


If politics made any sense, Democrats would be celebrating Clinton in the way Republicans celebrate the blessed Ronald, and they’d be hailing Obama as Saint Bill’s second coming. Meanwhile Republicans would be fairly diffident about a pretty good job but not all that exceptional expansion that was mainly Paul Volcker’s doing, and was a long time ago.




http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/21/democratic-booms/

[Fumesucker]

3. It's turning into a two layer job market..

A relative few extremely lucrative positions for the right person with the right connections and sometimes the right skills and a vast morass of low paid service workers who as far as the corporations are concerned would be better replaced with androids or robots and they will be as soon as it's profitable to do so.

Technology change is cumulative and the rate of change accelerates, there is an earthquake, a tsunami of automation coming that is going to overwhelm our traditional ideas of jobs for the average person.

[Cha]

7. We're talking JOBS where People are earning money instead of being out of work..

".. Obama has now presided over three years of fairly rapid job growth, with the most recent year the fastest since the 90s."

[840high]

10. Some of the people earning

money are holding down 2 part-time jobs to survive.

[Cha]

11. I'm glad they have jobs.. lots of people out here in Hawaii have two jobs too and are very grateful

[hifiguy]

2. Rand Paul needs to buy himself a toupee with some brains in it.

[brer cat]

4. ^^This^^

[Fred Sanders]

5. The graphic dip on the far right....closest to a Depression since the Depression. Obama stopped it.

Can you imagine what would be happening now if that dip remained......check out 1930's Germany for the answer.

[KingCharlemagne]

12. I actually believe the Reagan Recession (from 1981-83) was and remains the worst

since the Great Depression. (National unemployment rate reached 12% at the worst part of the Reagan Recession.) I don't recall how severe the slippage was in GDP during either recession, but IIRC Reagan's was worse sightly than Bush's.

I always like to remind Republicans about the Reagan Recession. Most of them old enough to have lived through it will deny it happened or refuse to believe me. But the facts don't lie.

[Fred Sanders]

15. No, ask an economist. You are wrong. GDP is the best indicator....ask an economist.

[bulloney]

6. Even Warren Brookes, a RW columnist of the 80s & 90s, admitted much of Reagan's job growth was from

the obscene levels of military spending during his presidency.

[joetubes]

8. Jobs

FACT!!!!!!!! More jobs were created during Clintons administration, 21M. Than during reagan + bush 1 + bush 1/2 18M. The largest tax increase under Clinton, the largest tax reduction under reagan + bush 1 + bush 1/2. So much for the rebups lie that reducing taxes create jobs. F O rebup ass wipers for the rich

[calimary]

9. Welcome to DU, joetubes!

Glad you're here! There's been a fair amount written lately about the economic turnaround and robust recovery that at least two states have enjoyed because they replaced republic-CON governors with Democrats. One is Minnesota with Mark Dayton taking over from the pathetically misguided tim pawlenty. They've erased the billions in debt and are back in the black, and jobs are up, and guess what started it? Taxes on the upper incomes went up when the Democrat came into office. Same here in California, where Jerry Brown has cleaned up after the reckless celebrity idiot and small-time reagan-impersonator ahnold schwarzenegger. When the governorship switched from "r" to "D", we pulled up out of the red to in-the-black out here, too.

And I can also think of two more states for which the flip side is true as well: Kansas and Wisconsin. Most places where there's an "r" in the governor's mansion, they're having some really serious budget trouble. As Howard Dean once said, in beautiful simplicity: "Republicans simply don't know how to handle money."

Which is something that we should be repeating and expressing widely and broadly, whenever the opportunity presents itself. We should never pass up a chance to educate and enlighten!

[Fumesucker]

13. The largest tax increase under Clinton

That's what the Democrats don't want to talk about...

Bring up Clinton too much and the tax increases become an issue then the big donors get their ever so fragile feelings hurt and think you are talking about their taxes.

No one profits when the big donors get their fee fees hurt, it wouldn't be prudent to blow the Clinton horn too loudly.

There's other reasons one of them being that woman, Ms Lewinsky but taxes is the big one.

[ND-Dem]

14. what boom under reagan? i remember reagan presiding over the deepest recession and

highest unemployment since the Depression, & the destruction of my hometown, from which it's never recovered.

The peak of the recession occurred in November and December 1982, when the nationwide unemployment rate was 10.8%, highest since the Great Depression. As of 2015, it is still the highest since the 1930s.... From a high of 10.8% in December 1982, unemployment gradually improved until it fell to 7.2% on Election Day in 1984.[6] Nearly two million people left the unemployment rolls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession


His "job creation" record is bullshit; just like today, people who had jobs and lost them getting them back, only slightly worse pay, conditions, etc.

[KingCharlemagne]

16. Reagan whipped inflation . . . on the backs of the working class. - nt