The economy is booming despite housing and credit. Poverty rates declining. Why are the Liberals screaming?

Question

They love statistics only when they suit their cause, but when statistics on the economy show vast improvement for everyone, they simply dismiss them. The poor are working more than under Clinton (although I give Clinton some credit for his welfare reform in 1996 as well as the strong economy of the present). Doesn't it have to start somewhere? My grandparents WORKED their way out of poverty, and never expected the government to save them. The uninsured still make up 15.3% which is the same as under Clinton (although our population keeps rising). I hear Hillary use the 47 million figure, but NEVER the 15.3% figure. Many of those people make OVER 75K! They CHOOSE not to buy it so they can get a bigger house or 3rd car. How is that Bush's fault? Can't Liberals ever acknowledge improvement? It's always a black cloud. It's not going to happen overnight!

Please avoid the rhetoric.

Read this before answering...

http://www.heritage.org:80/Research/Welfare/bg2064.cfm

Dan: have you seen today's GDP numbers for the first quarter? Those are DESPITE the volatility. Explain how Bush is responsible for the Housing crunch? This is my point...Liberals refuse to accept good news.

Answer 1

You are correct in the sense that statistics can be massaged to reflect differing agendas. It is a mistake to lay the onus solely on one camp or another. It is also a mistake to believe statistics that come from the same government that inflates a "guns and butter" economy through increasing the money supply.

No one should try to lay blame on a single political party. We should all be careful how we examine facts and the sources of those facts.

As far as "the liberal screaming" goes...
Most of the screaming I hear is from conservative talk-show hosts, not liberals.

There is no economic improvement when your country is TRILLIONS of dollars more in debt. That would be like saying that, just because you have sixty new credit cards with huge spending limits and maxed them all out, you are somehow more financially better-off. Increasing the money supply is a short term game that always comes back to haunt those who exploit it.

Both liberals and conservatives are guilty.

We should watch both sides of the isle.

Answer 2

Seems like you have all the answers... why are you asking, unless you are just trolling? Sounds to me like you get your opinions from right-wing nutjobs like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Conservatives are no less likely to use statistics to prove their points, and ignore them when they don't, than Liberals.

The report you posted is informative - certainly poor people in the US have it much better than poor people anywhere else - and I've found that no matter how poor someone is, they always seem to find money for beer, cigarettes, and cable TV.

I am suspicious of the claim "Among the Hispanic immigrants, 42.3 percent of children are born out of wedlock." - does this mean lack of a U.S. marriage, or an undocumented Mexican marriage? Mexicans tend to get married and stay married...it also seems to be calling on racist and xenophobic sentiments - frankly, immigrants are, and always have, been building this country's economy. They are willing to do the jobs native-born Americans refuse to do. Certainly, the welfare system is part of the problem - why clean toilets when you can collect a welfare check?

One way to reduce illegal immigration would be to make it easier for immigrants to legally enter the country and find work. But as long as corporations benefit from having a work force that will work for long hours, low wages, and can be kept under control by threats of deportation, they will not allow this to happen.

Ask yourself, for whom is the economic boom booming?

Who benefits?

Answer 3

I've been watching a lot of CNBC since the beginning of the liquidity crisis and I don't see many liberals there looking for a handout. What I see is a whole lot of upper middle class and lower upper class people, with a good smattering of upper upper class people, who bought into YET ANOTHER speculative boom demanding, now that it has PREDICTABLY come to an end, that the Fed lock in their ill gotten gains, and protect them from any future loss, by making money free again.

How is it that these people don't want to be taxed when they are making money by selling houses to each other every six months and causing honest people to be completely unable to live in gigantic swaths of the country, but they want mega-billion dollar bailouts when their own stupidity and greed get the better of them? When the Fed lowers interest rates to get them out of the mess they made for themselves, it creates inflation, which hurts people on fixed incomes. Why on earth would we want to hurt people on fixed incomes to help these greedy speculators? What did THEY ever do to them?

Tulipmania proved, in 1637, what happens when heretofor rational markets get taken over by speculators and turned into Ponzi schemes. It has happened time, and time, and time, and time again. It happens, in fact, every single time that prices lose their connection to intrinsic value and become solely a function of intrinsic value.

The people who are losing their investment properties, or worse having to actually live in them, should not be made whole. The people who extended them credit far in excess of their ability to pay so they could participate in the roulette game that people have been calling "the real estate bubble" for a DECADE, should not be made whole. Quite the opposite! If what they've done causes the rest of the country to suffer through a recession and dislocation... they should be punished! Seems to me we would be much better off if instead of talking about the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates, we started talking about cutting arms and legs off anybody who defaults on a zero equity mortgage. We should garnish whatever wages they have from now until the day their debt obligation is repaid.

Answer 4

The economy is not booming, it has become extremely volatile. Poverty rates may be lower, but the poor are still poorer than they would be with government assistance programs. And the rich are still richer because of the obscene tax cuts.

The federal deficit has gone through the roof, which we will all feel the effects of sooner or later.