Filed under: Economy
Professor Dan Mitchell explains why a second economic stimulus bill would be a horrible idea:
Given Rahm Emanuel’s recent comment that the Obama Administration has “rescued” the economy, and President Obama’s retort that maybe ailing elderly people should just “take a pill” instead of getting desired medical treatment, I think a new inspirational poster is in order:
UPDATE: Alternate version:
HotAir shines a light on fresh examples of AP and CNN spinning very bad economic news with very positive headlines: “Report has good news about jobs,” and “New jobless claims fall to lowest since January.”
Of course, this is nothing new:
A couple of months ago I wrote that House Republicans had improved their online videos so much that they’re now producing more interesting content than Hollywood-produced political videos.
Now House GOP Leader John Boehner and Congressman Lynn Westmoreland have added another clip to the Right’s growing collection of solid, creative online videos. For weeks, Republicans have been asking “Where are the jobs?” in the wake of the Democratic “stimulus” package. Now they’ve broken out an actual bloodhound to aid in the search:
The video works for a variety of reasons. It’s lighthearted in nature, but it make a very serious point: that the “stimulus” bill isn’t creating the jobs that Democrats promised. And it’s directly tied into the big economic news of the day: a stinker of a monthly unemployment report. It’s also good to see Leader Boehner outside his office or a TV studio and donning a short-sleeved shirt without a jacket and tie. You know – like everybody else in America, especially on Fourth of July weekend.
As a result, the video’s going viral today, being embedded on huge blogs like the Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics, and TownHall. Earlier today, it was even the #1 featured News and Politics video on YouTube.
Moral of the story: Ellie Mae the hound dog, via YouTube, is capable of communicating the “Where are the jobs?” message better than any single Member of Congress. But those Members of Congress are smart to realize that and enlist Ellie Mae in the fight.
Big “news” this morning: President Obama plans to “save or create” 600,000 additional jobs this summer!
At least that’s what you’d think by scanning today’s headlines. Reuters reporter Doug Palmer takes the President’s bait hook, line and sinker:
“President Barack Obama said on Monday that accelerated stimulus spending would create or save 600,000 jobs over the next 100 days,” Palmer wrote before parroting White House claims that the spending will quickly lead to new economic activity at national parks, veterans centers and Superfund sites from coast to coast. He then goes on to include five quotes from Obama and Vice President Biden, while only including one recycled quote from Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.
Mark Silva provides similarly uncritical coverage at the LA Times, providing a basic rewrite of the White House’s announcement and including three Obama and Biden quotes vs. one from McConnell.
At no point do either Palmer or Silva point out that stimulus spending was already scheduled to accelerate this summer (as AP does here,) nor do they question whether it’s even possible to measure the White House’s new and arbitrary metric of created or “saved” jobs. For that, we need to turn to the Wall Street Journal, where William McGurn writes:
“Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama’s jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one — not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics — actually measures “jobs saved.” As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama’s jobs claims are “based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs.” Nice work if you can get away with it.”
Indeed.
UPDATE, June 10, 12:00 p.m. – Cross posted on National Review Institute’s Media Malpractice blog.
Filed under: Economy, MSM, Obama, Online Video, Shameless Self Promotion | Tags: economic reporting, media bias
By the middle of 2003, a mild recession had ended and the economy turned around big-time, with the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs and whopping GDP growth of 7.5% in the third quarter. Yet month after month, the national media downplayed the good economic news with the dreaded “but,” as in “Positive economic indicator X was released today, but the economy is still in the toilet…” (Oh, by the way… George W. Bush was President back then.)
Of course, with President Obama now in the White House, the media’s economic coverage is the mirror opposite. As the unemployment rate skyrockets and hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every month, the bad economic news is spun by Obama’s friends in the media: “Negative economic indicator Y was released today, but it’s not nearly bad as we’d expected, and besides, unemployment can be fun!“
As I watched more and more of this massive change in the tone of economic reporting recently, I decided to produce a little compare-and-contrast video. I did so not in the hope that the media will now start talking down a possible economic recovery the way they so obviously and unfairly did a few years ago, but just to shine some light on the almost cartoonish nature of media coverage both then and now. And maybe to convince a reporter or two to not ask Obama how enchanting it is to be President, and instead maybe ask him how in the world we’re going to deal with this chart.
Filed under: Economy, Government Spending, Taxes | Tags: ari fleischer, robert samuelson
Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post: Obama’s Economic Mirage
Ari Fleischer in the Wall Street Journal: Everyone Should Pay Income Taxes
A couple of remainders on the dueling Tea Party movements on the Right and Left:
1. Instapundit has great side-by-side photos of last month’s recent free-market Tea Party in St. Louis and yesterday’s lefty “Nationalize the Banks” event. Knee-jerk ideological or partisan sniping aside, I think we can all agree that the grassroots energy has dramatically shifted to the free-market side in recent months, which is significant. The big question remains how much this will affect the policy battles ahead.
2. It’d be a lot easier to take the lefties seriously if they didn’t throw out non-sequiters like Fox News supposedly bankrolling the Tea Party movement or silly “teabagging” puns. Ha ha ha ha ha – teabagging. Yes, we know what it means. Got it. Absolutely hilarious. Now let’s all graduate from 7th grade and discuss how our kids and grandkids are going to pay off the $4 trillion in additional debt we’ve just run up in an attempt to save nationalize our economy. I admit it’s not fall-on-the-floor funny like teabagging puns, but at some point it’s an issue we should probably discuss.
You may have missed this in all the coverage of the President’s news conference, but last night the White House unveiled a new “Open for Questions” feature, similar to what they did during the transition at the Change.gov website.
The effort was announced in a web video featuring President Obama, who encourages viewers to submit questions online – either as text or as a videotaped question – then come back for an online Town Hall meeting with him on Thursday, where he’ll answer some of the questions.
Smart, smart stuff. Dammit. Of course, as I’ve lamented before, it’s beyond me why every GOP Member of Congress isn’t soliciting feedback online from their constituents, then answering a few of the letters and e-mails on YouTube every week or two.
Yes, the stock markets may be up recently, but as I’ve visited my friendly neighborhood Walgreens over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that at least one market has crashed hard: the vaunted Obama Victory Plate.
The Obama Victory Plate, like the President himself, peaked in January. Within a month, the Plate had fallen from its high of $19.99 to a mere $10.49. Now it’s all the way down to $5.19!
Which, of course, means it’s time for us hard-working taxpayers to bail out all those Obama fans who invested their life savings in the Victory Plate market. In the meantime, behold the Great Obama Victory Plate Crash of 2009:
