Democrats win House, promise new direction
POSTED: 6:05 p.m. EST, November 8, 2006(CNN) — Democrats promised Wednesday to lead the country in a new direction after winning control of the House for the first time in 12 years in midterm elections.
By early Wednesday, Democrats had picked up at least 29 seats; they needed 15 to capture a majority in the House. Two Democratic seats in Georgia that were targeted by Republicans remained too close to call.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-California, is now poised to become the first female speaker of the House.
Pelosi promised to lead the nation in a new direction “in partnership, not in partisanship.”
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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Both parties have sold us out.
The crash of 2008 took place after 7 years of the Bush Presidency and after 6 out of 7 years where Republicans controlled Congress as well. To imply the Republicans had nothing to do with that crash is not accurate or fair. Obviously that crash is what caused the huge spike in unemployment.
What part of that graph isn’t clear?
Correlation is not causation.
But many times it is. Genocide tracks nicely with degree of totalitarian control in Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia … etc.
Here in the USSA, welfare spending is directly proportional to compositional makeup of the elected branches the further left on this spectrum they are …
Socialists <– (D)ummycrats <– (R)epublicrats <– (R)epublicans <– Conservatives
Arrgh, try that again …
But many times it is. Genocide tracks nicely with degree of totalitarian control in Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia … etc.
Here in the USSA, welfare spending is directly proportional to compositional makeup of the elected branches the further left on this spectrum they are …
Socialists <– (D)ummycrats <– (R)epublicrats <– (R)epublicans <– Conservatives
Other way around Andy. What took the legs out of the economy was the wonderful spike in the minimum wage, up 41% in three 75 cent steps over 3 years, thanks to Nancy Pelosi. What many people don’t know is that many union contracts are indexed to the minimum wage, so that when it rises, their wages rise as well.
So it not only raised the cost of minimum wage labor, it raised the cost of some union workers, and by the way, the payroll taxes based on those new wages. It also raises wages up the chain as well since you can’t have shift supervisors or leads, etc. making the same amount as the new employees who just got raises. It put many small businesses out of business, and I mean well before the recession started. Small business forums had lots of stories with people who were planning to close their decades old businesses even before the first increase took effect. And they were saying that in 2007, well before the recession started.
Employment started dropping in January 2008, 6 months after the first increase July 2007. But GDP continued growing until Q4 of 2008. Almost a full year after employment started decreasing.
Employment coincidentally started going back up 8 months after the third step increase in minimum wage. Hard to believe that in the depth of the recession there was an increase in the minimum wage.
Now there’s another increase in the cost of employing people, in the form of Obamacare. And not surprisingly, in spite of millions more working age people, there are still fewer people working than before Pelosi’s first minimum wage increase.
Dot Com Bubble too.
Bush I inherited a recession, and 9/11. Then the Dems saved the day.
Leftists cannot read charts, and do not know history.
Six years of (R) bare House control and two years of 55-45 Senate control. Perhaps you remember that upon the Bush election they declared war on the (R)’s and that is why you see those changes with (I) members caucusing with (D)’s and assuming control on the 50-50 split, Daschle demanding power sharing and other tricks to gum up the works.
And since you are apparently based down in the District of Criminals you are probably aware that (R) Senate control is pure (R)epublicrat with perhaps 10 members considered (R)epublican in the Jeffersonian sense. There would need to be at least 60 (R) to get anything done but even then the bulk of them would be (R)epublicrats so perhaps with 70 there might be fiscal order.
What you can lean from that chart is that there is only one period of pure control, 2007-2011, four years total and two of them with a Communist President rubber stamp. If you want I’ll bet Steve can mark January 2009 on that chart to complement the January 2007 already indicated. Then his point will make sense to you?
Sources: Senate, House
DC “the land of unicorns and gumdrops” isnt exactly representative of the rest of the country Andy. Maybe you should venture out of that ridiculous town every once in a while. The blame bush card doesn’t work anymore. You should educate yourself on the housing bubble and follow that back in time .
Have you been using Mannian Statistics, Steve?
It looks a bit Hockey Stickish!
I don’t disagree that Obama sucks. The Deomocrats are a disaster. The chart is what it is. But to say that Republicans are blameless with respect to ecionomy is simply not true. The deficits exploded under Reagan and both Bushes. The 2nd Bush had a Republican congress the first 6 years, could have implemented whatever they wanted and that did not stop surpluses from becoming big deficits. The country under both parties have been proping up the economy with red ink for 30 years.
Andy, it would have exploded under Clinton, if Clinton had had his way too…
Newt shut things down, just like now, and Clinton gave in…
You’ve been lied to, Andy DC. Reagan’s supposed “exploding deficits” are a myth.
The following table is excerpted (with slight modifications) from an email I wrote 17 years ago. It shows that, contrary to Reagan’s detractors’ propaganda, he did not cause a significant lasting increase in the federal deficit:
DEFICIT F.Y. BILLIONS %GDP ADMINISTRATION REAGAN TAX CUT PHASE ---- -------- ---- -------------- -------------------- 1979 40,183 Carter 1980 73,835 Carter 1981 78,976 3% Carter 1982 127,989 Reagan Yr 1: 5% tax cut 1983 207,818 6% = peak deficit Reagan Yr 2: +10%=14.5% 1984 185,388 Reagan Yr 3: +10%=23% cut 1985 212,334 Reagan 1986 221,245 Reagan 1987 149,769 Reagan 1988 155,187 Reagan 1989 152,481 3% Reagan 1990 221,384 Bush 1991 269,521 Bush 1992 290,160 Bush 1993 ~300,000 BushOn day one of the first Reagan fiscal year (FY1982), which was when the first of Reagan’s tax and budget changes went into effect, the country was already deeply mired in recession. Inflation and taxes and interest rates were high, unemployment and poverty rates were rapidly worsening, communism was on the march throughout the world, and the U.S. military was in a terrible state of unpreparedness.
That was the legacy of Jimmy Carter and the Democrats.
Just over a year later, the recession ended, and beginning in early 1983 unemployment and poverty levels began to fall.
Here’s what happened:
Oct. 1, 1980 - Start of Carter's 4th fiscal year, FY 81. Economy was weak, but not yet technically in recession. Nov., 1980 - Reagan won election in a landslide. Jan., 1981 - Reagan took office. Jan.-Sept., 1981 - Reagan and Congress struggled over Reagan's proposed changes, enacting many of them. Economy worsened into deep recession. Oct. 1, 1981 - Day one of FY82 ("fiscal year 1982"), the first Reagan fiscal year. Carter's tax and budget policies end, Reagan's begin. Recession continued. ~Dec., 1982 - Recession ended. By spring of 1983, unemployment rate was finally falling instead of rising.All the economic statistics continued to improve throughout both of Reagan’s two terms. Unemployment improved, year after year. It fell from over 10% to about 5.3%. Poverty levels fell steadily, too, though the improvement was slower: the percentage of Americans below the poverty line fell from 15.3% to about 13%. (These figures can be found in almanacs.)
Per-capital personal income rose in every income quintile, from poor to rich.
Reagan, with the help of the Republicans who controlled half of Congress for six years, cut income taxes dramatically, in every tax bracket. He cut the top income tax rate gradually, from 70% to 28%. He eliminated entirely the requirement to pay income taxes for large numbers of working poor. He eliminated most of the tax shelters which had enabled many rich people to avoid most income tax.
Here I quote Paul Greenberg in Bill Clinton’s hometown newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 10/31/1994, p. 4B:
“To quote the Urban Institute, which is scarcely a pro-Republican outfit, in the 1980s ‘on average, the rich got a little richer and the poor got much richer… This pattern may be surprising to the general public, which has been led to believe that the poor were literally getting poorer over the past decade or two, and the incomes of the rich were skyrocketing. This is simply not true.'”
But what about the federal deficit? Didn’t Reagan make it worse?
Nope! Reagan inherited a budget deficit (in Carter’s final fiscal year) which was 3% of GNP, and rising. In Reagan’s final fiscal year, the budget deficit was back down to 3% of GNP. The peak was 6% of GNP, in 1983.
Most remarkably of all, Reagan also managed to bankrupt the USSR and win the cold war (with a bit of help mopping up, from Bush). He restored the respect of the United States in the world, and restored the credibility of the U.S. military. He arrested and reversed the march of communist tyranny throughout the world. Today, democracy, rather than communist dictatorship, is on the march throughout the world. Astonishingly, every country in the Americas except Cuba is now a democracy! (If anyone ever says anything good about Castro, make ’em read “Against All Hope,” by Armando Valladares — that should cure ’em!)
To say that the Reagan Administration was successful is a severe understatement. His success exceeded the wildest dreams of even his strongest supporters.
You had to have been there. I am old enough to remember the 1970s, when there was a broad consensus that the United States was in irreversible decline, that communism was the future of the world, that we would never again see the prosperity and growth of the 1950s and early 1960s. The USA was going the way of the British Empire, and the Roman Empire before that, we were told. Our children would be poorer than us, because we were using up the last of our natural resources. Our future was to be an era of “limits.”
Reagan proved them all wrong, on every count. The prosperity of the Reagan years exceeded even the prosperity of the 1950s and early 1960s. He turned the “inevitable” victory of communist oppression into a joke…
BTW, don’t feel bad. Most people are confused about the history of Reagan’s economic success — such is the power of the Left’s spin machine. (If you want to understand how Reagan did it, read Revolution, by Martin Anderson.)
This is how Psychology Today would deal with knowledge of Economics for the “little people”. Author does not want people to take classes anymore because Economics classes make people greedy.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201310/does-studying-economics-breed-greed
Frankly the participation rate is still at the recession lows and has never improved. The headline U3 unemployment is an absolutely fabricated number that does not include the underemployed, part time seeking fulltime and temp workers this is U6 and is about 14% last I saw.
It’s actually gotten worse. The recession low participation rate was 65.5% in March 2009. It has declined steadily, but for a few tiny blips, to 63.2% now. That’s the lowest since August 1978.