Try to grasp the concept of “time”. The reason the Reagan Boom lasted for more of Clinton’s term in office than of Reagan’s own, was because Reagan first had to cause it. Reagan inherited the economic doldrums Carter left behind, including the 12% inflation rate. For the first two years of Reagan’s term in office, he squeezed the money supply, breaking the inflation that had built up under Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Fixing the inflation problem has been an inportant contribution to the economy ever since, but, by any measure except what was happening to inflation, those were two very hard years. It wasn’t until 1983 that the Reagan Administration could ease off on the money supply, and allow the boom to get started. (It also took time to get the tax cuts and deregulation in place; easy money alone would not have caused the boom.) Once started, the boom ran through early 2000, faltering only during 1991, around the beginning of the Gulf War. By 1992, the economy was back on a roll. When Clinton took office, the boom was already running, and had been running uninterupted for more than a year. If Clinton had done nothing, the economy would have boomed through his entire term. The way to have a booming economy through a president’s entire term in office, is to have it already going on when he takes office.

“Nothing”, was far better than President Clinton could do. His health care scheme might have ended the boom–but it didn’t pass. His tax increases took some of the wind out of the economy’s sails, but didn’t do much harm. He didnt’ really damage the economy until he had already been in office for seven years. The boom ended in the second quarter of 2000, the economy actually shrank in the third quarter, and the next four quarters showed two quarters of weak growth, and two quarters of slight decline. When Clinton left office, he left the economy dead in the water. It didn’t really recover, until the Bush tax cuts kicked in.

In general, any economic peak is the time when growth changes to decline. The policies that end growth aren’t the ones you want. The policies that help the economy are those which led up to the peak, not those which are in place at the peak.

I did, indeed, give President Clinton some credit for letting the boom run as long as he did. Some presidents would have crashed it right away; he didn’t do much harm for seven years. As I said, we’ve had worse. But to give him credid for starting the boom, requires the assumption of time travel. And again, if you want another boom, you want the policies that start a boom, not the policies that end one.

Do the math.

Economic growth slowed to a standstill under Bush I and, under Reagan, averaged 20 percent less than under Clinton. Reagan also brought on the worst recession since the Great Depression. In fact, the Reagan recession of 1982 is still the worst since the Great Depression, with the current Bush II mess poised to overtake it, though it hasn’t yet.

No matter how you slice it, the economy fared better under Clinton than under any president since JFK.

Now, if you want to start giving Bush I credit for what happened under Clinton’s 8 years, or blaming Clinton for what happened under Bush II’s eight years, you’ll logically have to credit Carter for what happened during the Reagan years.

To be sure, presidents can’t be reasonably held responsible for every economic trend that takes place on their watch. Still, when a president leads for 8 years, it’s ludicrous not to give him a share of credit or blame for the economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/us/politics/15blagojevich.html?hp

“Even with approval ratings that had sunk to 13 percent as details of the federal investigation into his administration had seeped out over the past three years, Mr. Blagojevich, incredulous prosecutors say, still spoke in his recorded conversations in the past six weeks of the possibility of remaking his political future and running for president, perhaps in 2016.”

“Mr. Blagojevich seemed confident, said two former employees, who refused to be named out of concern that their comments could jeopardize their current work, that he would soon be selected as Mr. Kerry’s running mate. (An aide to Mr. Kerry’s campaign says he was never under consideration.) At the time, there seemed only one problem: Mr. Blagojevich was uncertain he wanted to be a No. 2.”

What is it with the media?

http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/media_continuing_to_defend_blagojevichs_attempt_to_sell_a_seat_in_the_us_se/

http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/jim_lehrer_on_blagojevich_whats_the_big_deal/

“Given that Obama has, in large part, reappointed the Clinton administration, shouldn’t we be expecting similar results:

“Record-breaking economic growth, consistent increases in average personal income, declining public deficits and debt, and relative geopolitical peace and stability?”

Bogey Man:

Pay attention to the calender, and you won’t be fooled quite so often. If we want a return to the prosperity of the 1983-2000 boom, we need a return to the policies which started it, not the policies which ended it. The Clinton administration inherited the greatest boom in US history, and managed to crash it. (To his credit, President Clinton didn’t crash the boom right away. We’ve had worse. But, to the extent that the end of the boom, in the Spring of 2000, had a single cause, it was the Clinton Administration’s cutting off small business access to the capital market.)

An Obama Administration will inherit an economy that is already staggering under the weight of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown (which Senator Obama personally helped cause). Senator Obama may have already caused a depression. Some business have cut back, in fear of the tax increases Senator Obama has promised, and the declining business they expect to see, with an anti-prosperity administration. I’ve only seen one story about a business shutting down specifically because the owner thinks the cost of riding out an Obama administration won’t be worth it. I don’t know how widespread the “Obama cutbacks” are. If enough business cut staff because they’re battening down the hatches against an expected Obama typhoon, that’s a depression–but I doubt I’ll ever know how much American business has declined specifically in anticipation of this threat. One thing that makes it difficult to see the causes of economic activity is that the business world, of necessity, looks to the future. That does mean that a credible threat can cause a crash.

I doubt that the Obama Administration will do as much damage as the Clinton Administration did, simply because the economy doesn’t have as far to fall. But brining in the people who managed to end the last boom, when the economy is already weak, is not particularly promising.

If we had evidence that Obama IS a communist, we wouldn’t be sitting around speculating about what effect his neighbors, mothers partners, etc. did or did not have on him.

Obama has been an elected official for almost a decade. He’s cast many votes on a wide range of issues.

If you want to paint Obama as a communist, doesn’t make a lot more sense to point to his voting record? Unless of course, his voting record doesn’t bear that out. And if that case, do you really want to keep emphasizing that by pointing instead to guilt by association?

Secondly, conservatism has a lot more to offer, in my opinion, than simply opposition to communism. It offers a worthy, principled critique of moderate liberalism. If only Americans who call themselves conservatives would stick to those principles.

I get a sense on this blog that the only ideology some conservatives feel up to battling is Stalinism. Thus the desperate resort to comically thin innuendo and guilt by association to label even demonstrated moderate liberals as “communists.”

Wouldn’t it be so much easier, let alone more effective, to attack Obama for what he actually is?

Obama has been steeped in Communism his whole life. His father in Kenya was a Communist. His stepfather in Indonesia was a Communist. His mentor in Hawaii was a Communist. I don’t know much about his mother, but I can safely assume that she was at least attracted to men who were Communists. Ayers was and is a communist. (Small “c” by his own admission.)

If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it ain’t no armadillo.

Kurtz in the WSJ establishes neither meaningful nor operative links between Obama and Ayers. He merely points out that the two were likely to have worked on the same education project at the same time.

The proof that Kurtz found no active, meaningful links, I’ve explained at length above, is that Obama’s most fevered critics must still focus on what they don’t know about Obama’s alleged links, rather than what they do.

If Kurtz had established meaningful, operative links, we’d be discussing how those links will affect his administration, rather than spinning ’round and ’round with speculation about what contacts the two may have had.

That’s the only point you tried to make. If you’ve got anything else, bring it on.