How do you spell stagflation?

It's a bullshit comparison, and you damn well know it.

Unemployment was at 7.5% when Clinton's term started.

So to get it down to 6.2% in 3 years is PROGRESS. And it was 3.9% when his term was over.

That 3.9% was the starting point for Bush43. So of course his "number" after the first three years will be better than Clinton's. Bush43 had a 3.6% "starting-point advantage."

This is mathematics 101, guys.

A president has ZERO say in what numbers he inherits. All he can do is show a positive trend for those numbers during his term.

You want short term numbers?

LAST three years of Clinton vs. LAST 3 years of Bush43.

Get to work.

The Dow has NEVER ended any month above 14,000. It spent about three nanoseconds there. You can look it up.

http://www.econstats.com/eqty/eqem_mi_3.htm

 

Please scroll back to Reply #46, previous page.

 

Ragu - we both know that 2 months from now they will release revised numbers that won't be that bad. Those new numbers won't get any press though. These numbers are almost always wrong when first released.

 

http://ingrimayne.com/econ/EconomicCatastrophe/GreatDepression.html

Um, NO, things gradually IMPROVED through two rounds of of the New Deal.

While I'll agree that the Depression did not end until WWII began, that was NOT when signs of recovery began. Virtually every economic indicator (unemployment, GDP, the market, etc.) points to around 1933 as the worst point in the depression, and then those indicators began gradually improving from around 33 onward.

Not coincidentally, 1933 was also the year that FDR became president and we switched from an Adam Smith-inspired economic policy to the New Deal. That suggests to me that his policies probably had something to do with it.

 

No, Stoney. The economy deteriorated again in 1936-38 ... not to the levels of 1932-33, but certainly not to call it "improvement". The 1930s were NOT a period of gradual economic improvement, that's for sure.

World War II deserves a lot more credit than FDR's New Deal for the end of the Depression, no matter how the history books write it.

 

Where do we start?

The Katrina spike had spent itself by the beginning of 2006. I paid $2.04 a gallon in March of that year.

You mean, after your oil buddies dropped prices in a bald-faced bid to swing the outcome of the mid-terms.

More bullshit. Gas prices had dropped back to near $1 a gallon at the end of 2001 after 9/11.

Since supply is much more than adequate worldwide, demand is not a part of the equation at all. In fact, demand has dropped significantly.

 

But there were far FEWER people without jobs and in that position after the New Deal programs were implemented than before, a fact which is undisputable statistically.

Look, obviously the entire decade was one of enormous economic despair. I'd never dispute that, and I've never claimed that the New Deal alone cured the Depression. I was only contesting your claim that things just got "worse and worse" through two FDR terms. That appears to be false.

In terms of trends: 1929-33 (when Hoover was in office) was a complete free fall--EVERY economic indicator was FAR worse at the end of that period than the beginning. And nearly every indicator began improving around 33, and ALL were far better after the 2d New Deal term was complete than they'd been when it began eight years earlier, even with the downward period from 36-38 taken into account. I do believe that fits the definition of "improvement."

 

That's what I thought, too. Until I checked.

1936 unemployment rate: 16.9%

1938 unemployment rate: 19.0% (only a slight improvement on 1934's 21% rate).

Now here's where it gets interesting.

In 1940 it dropped to 14.6%. We were not at war yet . . . so obviously things were improving.

But war accelerated the turnaround tremendously.

1944 unemployment rate: 1.2%

 

But it was around 25% in 1933, when the New Deal programs were first implemented.

 

True, but I do not call going from 25% to 19% in five years a rousing success.

I call it "things have to get better . . . so they did."

FDR could have instituted Lenin's Five Year Plan . . . and things would have probably gotten a little better.