By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
October 2, 2002
Last week House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, a Democrat from Missouri, delivered what appeared to be a 30 minute campaign speech on the floor of the House: (1) "We now have an economy that is in some real difficulty" he said "Since January 2001, our economy has deteriorated dramatically." Using charts in his speech, and on his website, he says: "From January 2001 when we had 5.9 million people unemployed, we now have, as of last month, 8.1 million people unemployed -- a 2.2 million increase in unemployment. This is as a result in large part of the Bush economic plan…" The President's economic plan that he is referring to was the 2001 tax cut that he asked for and which was passed by Congress in 2001.
However, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, (2)Gephardt,'s figures are wrong. The unemployment in January 2001, when George W. Bush took office, was 6.6 million, not 5.9 million and in September 2001 unemployment had risen one tenth of one percent to 6.7 million. After 9-11, unemployment began to rise and was at 8.9 million by January 2002.
Since then it has been coming down. By August 2002 it was down to 8.1 million, which is lower than it was in January 1996 when the media was telling us the "Clinton economy" was booming. . Furthermore, as the nation's population grew, the PERCENTAGES of unemployment changed. There are twelve million more people employed today than in January 1996 when President Clinton announced in his State of the Union speech "Our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades."
There are an amazing 2 million more Americans employed in September 2002, in spite of the terrorist attacks, than in January 2001. How can our economy have "deteriorated rapidly" since President Bush entered the White House, as Gephardt, claims, if the figures are the same or better than they were when our economy under President Clinton was the "healthiest it has been in three decades?"
What we are watching is vintage Democrat politics. It worked in 1932 when the Democrats blamed a worldwide depression on President Herbert Hoover and it worked in 1992 when Bill Clinton told (3) the prestigious Wharton School of Business: "The current administration has compiled the worst economic record in 50 years." Clinton seemed to be attacking not only President George H.W. Bush for going to war with Saddam Hussein, but even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, in 1942 spent 238% more than the treasury received in taxes. Immediately after Pearl Harbor the stock market dropped 17% by December 29th, from a high of 129.60 in July to 107.60 on December 29, 1941. After 9-11 the stock market dropped from a high of 10,423.20 on August 24th to 8,235.80 on September 21, 2001, a 21% drop.
In the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the Bush Administration spent 25% more than it received, and most of that was reimbursed because he had required the Arab countries to foot the bill. Six years later with Clinton in the White House and Democrats were again trying to recapture the Congress; they blamed the Stock Market's 18% drop, from 9338 in Mid-July to 7632.4 by October 1, 1998, on the Republican Congress, not the White House.
In fact, West Virginia Democrat Robert Wise speaking on the House Floor on October 6, 1998, never even mentioned Clinton's existence. He said: "One would think that with millions of Americans having lost much of their retirement in just the last 2 months because of the stock market going into the tank, one would think that that could be something that Congress could deal with. "Millions of Americans are going to get a surprise this month when they go to open their quarterly statement on their 401(k) or thrift plan, retirement plan to find out how much their holdings have diminished because of the stock market decline."
After the voters wisely returned the Republican Congress in November 1998, the stock market began to climb. From Election Day November 3, 1998 to December 29, 1999 the stock market rose from 8706.20 to 11,484.70, rising 2778.5 or a whopping 32% gain in a year's time, for which, of course, the Democrats and the media thanked Clinton, not the Republican Congress.
So far, in the Congressional election year of 2002, the stock market has done about the same thing as it did in 1998. It has dropped 18% from high in July 2002 of 9,379.50 to 7,701.45 on September 27, 2002, an 18% drop, the same percentage as in 1998. Only, this time, Gephardt says, it was the fault of the man in the White House, not the Congress that is caught in the grip of Senatorial gridlock. Other possible factors affecting the Stock Market have been totally ignored. For example, the impact of the terrorist attack of 9-11 on foreign investors, who appear to have moved billions of investment dollars out of US Stocks to, of all places, Communist China. In fact, after being approved for the 2008 Olympics and membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), for the first time in history, China topped the USA (4) as the world's most attractive place for foreign direct investment (FDI).
The Democrats are decades behind the times. They still believe that all that is necessary to convince most of the public they are DOING something about challenging problems facing us in the 21st Century is to scare and mislead the old folks and confuse the young ones with false statements.
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