Quote:
Originally Posted by
Bergermeister 
After reading around for a while:
The numbers are wrong! They can't be that low! That means fewer people are suffering and less support for us! How in the world could people want the nation to suffer? If the figure had been over 8% or even gone up, they would have jumped for joy, while thousands suffered?
The claim is the numbers are cooked. Right. Why not until now? There's a pretty steady decline in the graph since the first year. Also, the last political appointee to the commission that determines the rates left not long ago... he had been appointed by the War President, GW himself. Also, isn't this data, which has till now been over 8% for many months, the source data for a large part of Mittens' attacks? The data is only good when it helps us; as soon as it starts helping Obama, it's cooked.
You should read around a little more... The Right has been complaining for over a year now that the employment numbers dont' make sense. The Right is continuously citing the U6 number which is relatively unchanged at I believe 14.1% as opposed to the commonly reported U4 number which just recently dropped to an all-time low under Obama of 7.8%. Interesting how the U6 number remained unchanged at 14.1% with such meager job growth, 114k people dropping out of the work-force, and something like 600k part time job additions while the U4 number dropped by .5%.
Chicago politics. The Right wants the WH, to be president over the entire country. That includes Chicago. Way to alienate a large city, where there are also likely GOPpers. Ring bells of 47%...or "real Amerika"? The GOP enjoys alienating large portions of the populace in fell swoops.
You make it sound as if the Right invented the term Chicago style politics in honor of Obama. You are aware that this cliche has been around since the roaring 20s when the mob controlled politics in the city of Chicago. I don't have any links or specifics, but I've heard that Obama played some truly nasty politics when he ran for his Illinois state senate seat.
The president didn't do anything to change the jobless rate. Private businesses do that. But Romney claims he will create 12 million jobs. By enlarging the government?
I think it's a pretty safe bet that you are not going to see that kind of government job growth under Romney. I believe Romney has specifically state that something like 4 million jobs will come from increasing domestic energy production and approval of the Keystone Pipeline. I can only assume that the rest of his job growth is thru a combination of specific initiatives and projected job growth from a dramatic change in policy. Obviously this is the kind of rhetoric that people like to hold candidates accountable to, but differing analysis on the proposed plans will result in different estimates so???
Things are getting better after a hard time. That is good news. The bad year was Obama's first, when the world was still in free fall after the reign of Bush. There has been improvement ever since. The job's not done yet, but things are getting better. That is good.
If you measure this by the U4 number as mentioned above, sure. The U6 number however paints an entirely different picture. I would say that things currently aren't getting any worse, I'll grant you that much, but things really aren't getting any better. I really do wish that wasn't the case, but when you factor in labor participation rate and the number of people stuck in part time jobs who would prefer and in most cases need full time jobs, it just isn't the case.
McConnell said his job was to make sure Obama served only one term. Last I checked, his job was to serve the American people and work as a part of one branch of the government (of which the president is another) to serve the people as a whole, not his party.
Congratulations on making a good point. This was a dumb thing for McConnell to say. Of course it was fuel for the base and they ate it up, but it was still a dumb thing to say in any context.
How closely did Boehner work with Obama to improve the lives of Americans? The US's credit rating was reduced... why?
How closely did Pelosi work with Bush? You want to talk about working together, how about Harry Reid not even bringing legislation passed by the House to a vote in the Senate? The US credit rating reduction??? You think Boehner is responsible for the credit rating decrease? It wouldn't have anything to do with trillion plus dollar deficit spending as far as the eye could see could it? The House passed a budget to reduce this spending, which of course Harry Reid never would allow on the Senate floor for a vote.
Anybody got data for: which states are the poorest, which have the highest unemployment, which have the lowest number of insured, which have the lowest number of high school graduates, which take the most in government handouts, which states are primarily Republican or Democrat? Usually, these graphs are pretty telling.
OK. I'll take a shot at some of this. I'm definitely not going to perform a state by state analysis for you, but let's just compare the Democratic bastion of California to the Republican bastion of Texas...
Unemployment rate... Ca 10.6% Tx 7.1 (Ca is 50% higher)
Uninsured Ca 20% Tx 24% (However in numbers this would be approximately 5.8 million in Tx as compared to 7.6 million in Ca.)
Graduation rate Ca 80% Tx 70% (Again Ca comes in short in absolute numbers due to a much larger population, Ca 7.6 million drop outs, Tx 7.3 million. I'll give you that Ca does really good here.)
I haven't had lots of luck in terms of finding out about government handouts though. Poor is a harder one to compare since you would need to factor in cost of living to this particular number and I'm not going to bother with that. I looked for poverty rate by state, but this was also not easy to find. Based upon these metrics I would say at best your suggestion ends up being a wash as to Republican or Democrat. Of course you could argue either way as Ca won two of the three metrics on a percentage basis, but I would also be inclined to weight unemployment as the highest of the three metrics and Tx beats Ca by 50% which translates into a huge number on an individual basis. I'm not going to even guess how a full analysis of this would fall out, but I doubt that all of the metrics you listed would paint a clear picture one way or the other.
