If anyone was wondering how the talking heads over at Faux "news" were going to handle the news that the economy has been improving, despite the claims of impending doom from the talking heads in our media and from those on the right for some time now, well, here you go.
Peter Morici wasn't the only hack on Fox this week doing his best to continue to push the failed trickle-down policies that Republicans have been lying about since their anointed one, St. Ronnie was in office.
It was upside-down land on Neil Cavuto's show this Thursday as well, with former Reagan economic adviser and resident joke Art Laffer doing his best to pretend that the reason the economy is doing better now is because we've stopped stimulus spending. Never mind that recent reality is biting the two of them in the butt.
Rough transcript below:
CAVUTO: Heading into 2015, the president taking a big bow for the outgoing 2014 and taking plenty of credit with the sixth straight year of gains, and he tells NPR, real job gains too. He credits his policies, which is exactly what worries former Reagan economic adviser Art Laffer. Why Art? More government?
LAFFER: Well, I hope he doesn't do more government, but I don't think he's going to be successful with that. If he wants to increase stimulus spending of any sort, I think the Republican House and the Republican Senate will hold him back. Now, there's some areas where I think we will get a little more government. I think for example the sequestration on military will be removed and we'll be able to get some military spending in there to go after ISIS and this, but in general there is not going to be a period of stimulus spending in any way, shape or form.
CAVUTO: But, you know, the president is going to go back and you and I know that any president, Republican or Democrat goes back on the metrics, you know, the measures by which we all look at how a president's term fared. He'll talk about the performance of the markets, big run-ups. He'll talk about the improvement in jobs from what it was when he took office and say under his stewardship things turned around mightily and you can credit stimulus, you can credit my programs for that. Do you?
LAFFER: Yeah, I don't think those are the correct metrics that he's using. I mean, if you look at employment as a share of the adult population, which is about as broad a metric as you can get, it fell continuously from 2000 down to where it is now, a little bit above fifty nine percent. It was at sixty four and a half percent when Clinton left office. It's been a very bad period and there's no sign of it re-rising rapidly at all.
And the other thing, if you look at GDP, I mean, the broadest measure of output of the country, real GDP, vis-a-vis trends is at the lowest level it's been since 1947. We're about four, four and a half trillion dollars below that trend. Now, those are the two broadest measures I can think of. I'm sure in Iowa, one corn farmer is producing less than last time. You can always pick and choose these numbers Neil, but in the broad sense this is the single worst recovery in U.S. history and there's no covering it, there's no sugar coating. There's nothing that's going to make this president look like a good president for the economy. It just didn't happen.
Cavuto then asks Laffer to respond to how our economy is doing compared to the rest of the world.
LAFFER: Well, you know, they're just doing a lot of awful policies as well. What happens when these bad economics get into place, they spread the world over. I mean, bad economics are the most tradeable products in time and space imaginable and if all these people are trained at the same universities, Harvard, MIT and these others, it's no wonder that these policies are made. […]
These policies don't work. I've never heard of a poor person spending himself into wealth. It makes no sense whatsoever. And the reason we're now coming out is because all of those stimulus dollars spent are now drying up and government spending as a share of GDP is falling very sharply, which is leading to a modest recovery right now, and I think it will continue and I'm very optimistic about the long term, but the reason why we're having any growth now is because of stimulus spending running off and not being there any more.
