Daschle: Everything wrong with the economy is Bush's fault (9/19)

By Ben Fritz

In the midst of debate over a potential war in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, tried to turn attention back toward the economy with a high-profile speech on the Senate floor yesterday. Like many such Democratic attacks over the past year, however, Daschle’s speech repeatedly distorted the facts in order to blame President Bush for developments that are clearly not his fault alone.

Most egregiously, Daschle blamed Bush for the entire decline in the ten-year federal budget surplus projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). “When President Bush took office, the Congressional Budget Office projected a $5.6 trillion surplus,” he stated. “As a result of what the President has signed into law or is currently proposing, the surplus projection becomes a $400 billion deficit.” But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that that 44 percent of the decline in the surplus since January 2001, or about $2.3 trillion, is due to lost revenue from the recession and technical re-adjustments. These have little or nothing to do with the President’s tax cut, nor with the spending increases he signed into law (many of which were supported by Daschle).

The Majority Leader also offered deceptive comparisons when analyzing the number of jobs lost since Bush took office. He notes that the economy has lost two million private sector jobs in the past 18 months and states, “[Y]ou would probably have to go all the way back to the 1930s to see the last time in our Nation's history when we last witnessed a loss in private sector jobs over the course of the life of an administration ... Over the last 50 years, in every administration since Dwight Eisenhower, we have seen private sector job growth.”

Daschle is comparing apples and oranges, however. “[T]he course of the life of an administration” measures between four and eight years (save for Kennedy’s shortened term), while Bush has been in office for only 18 months. There’s no way to predict yet that the entire Bush administration will not see net private sector job growth.

Finally, Daschle, like other Democrats before him, implicitly blamed Bush for the massive decline in the stock markets during his term. “We have lost $4.5 trillion in market capitalization just in 18 months,” he said, adding, “I cannot think of a more graphic illustration of how terrible this economy truly is and how poorly our markets are performing and how little confidence there is in the economic strategy of this administration.” In fact, however, the stock market declines began before Bush came into office and are impossible to attribute to any one cause.

Daschle’s speech was touted by Democrats as the beginning of a sustained attack on Republicans’ economic policy. If this is any indication though, it looks like truth will rank behind “blame them for everything” in Democrats’ campaign playbook.

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9/19/2002 08:02:23 PM EST |

The big NEA-Sept. 11 lie, cont'd. (9/18)

Blaming the NEA for preaching tolerance toward al-Qaida is too much fun for conservatives to stop. Even if it isn't true.
By Brendan Nyhan
[First published on Salon.com]

The myth (previously debunked here) that the National Educational Association told teachers not to blame Sept. 11 on al-Qaida continues to unravel. It's now clear that Washington Times reporter Ellen Sorokin based her original myth-creating article on a preliminary NEA Web site that clearly wasn't complete, misconstruing quotations from a recommended sample essay allegedly written by a professor named Brian Lippincott and attributing them to the NEA. Even worse, the essay in question, published by the National Association of School Psychologists on Sept. 15, 2001, was meant to preach tolerance toward Arab and Muslim Americans -- not al-Qaida. And Lippincott, contrary to what has been widely reported, did not even write it. Yet the myth still continues to spread in Op-Ed columns, on TV and even in a comic strip. (Click here to read the whole column.)

[This column was previously available exclusively on Salon.com.]

9/17/2002 08:51:35 PM EST |

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