Which is understandable given the circumstances. Thanks to Right Wing politics, more than a million jobs have been cut from the public sector, while the private sector continues to add jobs.
Remember several years ago the myth was that Obama was a socialist whose only plan to increase employment was to dump so much money into the government that it would hire millions of temp workers.
In fact, the opposite has happened. If Obama is such a hindrance to private sector employment, then why has it continued to produce jobs over the past three years?
Reagan's recovery from a much milder recession was aided in large part to a drastic increase in government spending which jacked up public sector employment. It also benefited from drastic cuts to interest rates. If government wasn't hindered by Right Wing politics, then it could do what was done under Reagan: produce 1.3 million more jobs as schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, etc.
Every where you turn in history, you see that the "Liberal" plan works. All the things that made Reagan's recovery work are precisely the things Obama can't do, mainly because he is up against a congress that is dead set on voting against anything he tries. The same is true under Bush:
That's the irony. The Rand/Hayek philosophy that is so adored by Loran is to starve government and make it as small as possible and then, the theory goes, things will be much better for the overall economy. And yet those more likely to dump billions into government spending have been Republicans.
We now know that if employment in the public sector had remained steady, the unemployment rate would be much lower than it is now. And if it had increased as much as Obama proposed, then unemployment could be well under 7% by now. But thanks to Republicans getting their way, he can't pass much of anything, and the end result is bad for America. But Republicans don't care because they know everyone will blame the President.
In other words, a full percentage point of unemployment is owed to all those government-spending-cutting Right Wing Governors Brackite loves to brag about.
The Obama administration's jobs bill would have given about $35 billion to state and local governments to prevent many of these public sector job losses, but because of a Republican filibuster, the bill has languished. Since then, the public sector has lost 124,000 jobs.
The Reagan recovery is also owed to a large increase in government spending and the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates.
The Congressional Budget Office explained that because the 1980s recession was caused "by monetary restriction aimed at bringing inflation under control," "[l]ower interest rates after mid-1982 permitted the recovery to begin." Today's Federal Reserve does not have this same ability, because the interest rates are already nearly 0.
What's more, President Reagan greatly increased government spending to aid the economic recovery. In contrast, government spending under President Obama is falling at a rate of 1.4 percent, the first decline in real spending since the 1970s, as The Wall Street Journal noted:
Man, Obama really
sucks as a "Socialist"!
And what I have tried to explain several times in the past is that cutting the top marginal tax rate doesn't end recessions and the Reagan recession was
no exception.
Michael Mussa, a member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in an essay for American Economic Policy in the 1980s (University of Chicago Press, 1995) that when the Federal Reserve cut the discount rate a half percentage point on July 20, 1982, it "signal[ed] the beginning of what would become a four-and-a-half-year period of quite rapid monetary expansion. During this period, interest rates, both short and long term, would be driven significantly lower, and the U.S. economy would substantially recover from the devastation of both inflation and recession." [American Economic Policy in the 1980s, 9/1/95, via Google Books]
An August 1983 CBO report titled "The Economic and Budget Outlook: An Update" concluded that "[l]ower interest rates after mid-1982 permitted the recovery to begin":
Recovery started in December 1982 from the deepest postwar recession, the second of two since 1980. Both recessions were brought on by monetary restriction aimed at bringing inflation under control. Lower interest rates after mid-1982 permitted the recovery to begin. Real GNP grew at a 2.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter and at an 8.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter of 1983. [Congressional Budget Office, August 1983]
Now if Reagan's own economists didn't think the increased employment was due to tax cuts, then why should anyone else? This is just another myth and one that was gradually created during the Reagan-worship period after Clinton, mostly by the talk radio idiots and Think Tanks on the Right. It is a classic example of the cause-effect fallacy used to confuse and deceive simple minded folks like Droopy.