Clearing up misinformation about the economy

Several independent studies have shown that people who watch Fox News are LESS well-informed than are people who do not any news shows at all.   Translated:   Fox News spews out lies and misinformation.    Here are three charts that help set President Obama's economic record straight, in contrast to those lies.

The numbers come from the "Budget of the United States Government:   Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2015."   They are official, and anyone can look them up.   Why Fox News -- and right wing radio hosts -- continue to claim otherwise can only be explained by a political agenda . . . unless it's just plain stupidity.   But why would stupidity always skew toward conservatism?   Well, there may be a reason, but that's another conversation.

Spending
The first chart has to do with spending.   As can plainly be seen, government spending rose dramatically under President George W. Bush, only slightly under President Barack Obama:  an 88% increase under Bush vs less than 4% increase under Obama.
Deficits
Republicans seem obsessed with reducing the deficit.   Most economists agree that, in times of economic recession or sharp downturn, the emphasis should be jobs, not the deficit.   So federal stimulus spending to create infrastructure and service jobs, along with unemployment insurance, make much more sense than cutting spending.

But, even given that and the necessary compromises Obama had to make on spending, here's what happened to the deficit under these two presidents.   One can easily argue that the economy would have returned faster if Obama could have gotten higher stimulus spending through congress.   Bush was charging the costs of his two wars rather than raising taxes to pay for them.   Thus, he was clearly the deficit-raising president, Obama the deficit-cutting one.

But you'd never know it if you listen to the Republicans and their pundits who yell about the "exploding deficits" under Obama.    Please, Republicans, point out where you see that on this chart.


The Stimulus and Jobs
And then we come to jobs.   Bar lines going down mean jobs lost;  those going up indicate job gains.   Red is for the Bush years, blue for the Obama years.    The stimulus spending reversed the lost-job trend and returned us to a net-gain level.   But then the stimulus spending was cut, or ran out, and the upturn leveled off.  


This is the basis for thinking that it would have been better to do more stimulus and for longer.   And that was the advice from progressive economists at the time.   But it was politically impossible to get an ideologically conservative congress to abandon it's "small government, spending-is-bad" mentality.   So we have had a sluggish, prolonged recovery, when it might have been much quicker and better with proper stimulus.   Thus, saith the progressives, with whom I agree.

Back to the larger question of why Republicans and FoxNews in particular are so committed to misinformation.   It puzzles me how they can feel proud of their party that seems to believe the only way to win elections is to mislead (wrong information), deny facts (economic charts), doubt science (climate change), and keep Democratic leaning voters from being able to vote.

And they have the audacity to then stand up and claim the mantle of Patriotism.

Bah humbug !

Ralph