Herman
Cain
Read Herman's bio and previous columns
September 1, 2008
Economic Growth Surges,
but Democrats Ignore the Truth Again
While the Democrats had their week of unchallenged propaganda about
their party – how perfect it is and how terrible the Republicans are –
the latest good news about the economy and the average adjusted gross
income went unnoticed.
Once again, when Democrats don’t like the facts, they just ignore them
with the help of the mainstream media.
On
August 26, Investor’s Business Daily reported data from the
Internal Revenue Service showing that the average U.S. income had
increased every year for five straight years through 2006. In fact, the
$58,029 average was $739 higher than the peak year of 2000, the year
before the 2001 recession.
The following day, Sen. Joe Biden declared in his vice-presidential
acceptance speech that “John McCain thinks that during the Bush years
we’ve made great progress economically, I think it’s been abysmal!”
Great progress or abysmal, you make the call.
On
August 28, the Associated Press reported the latest Commerce Department
data showing that the economy grew faster than previously thought in the
April-June 2008 quarter. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew at 3.3
percent, exceeding both the initial estimate and economists’
expectations.
As
a reminder, we still have not had a recession since 2001, using the
standard definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of
negative GDP growth. But don’t tell the Democrats and the mainstream
media. You might disrupt their imaginary recession.
Investor’s Business
Daily even
dared to declare in their sub-title that “Americans are better off than
when Bill Clinton was president”.
(Insert Democratic scream of choice here.) That can’t be!
The same night as the IBD report, Sen. Barack Obama repeated his
persistent claim that the Bush economic policies had been a failure,
while giving his American Idol-like acceptance speech for the
Democratic presidential nomination. And of course, he told us, electing
John McCain would be four more years of the Bush economic failure.
The supposed failure of Bush’s economic policies has been a constant
theme of the Democrats since the 2006 elections, when the Democrats
regained control of the House and Senate by convincing enough of the
voters that the economic sky was falling, and that the war in Iraq could
not be won. Based on all of their convention speeches, they plan to
continue those themes right through Election Day on November 4.
They are counting on a gullible and uninformed electorate to win the
White House and a larger majority in Congress.
This week’s Republican National Convention will be the Republicans’
opportunity to state how great they are and how bad the Democrats are.
We already know that those extremes are simply not true, just as most of
us know that the Democrats exaggerated their extremes for a week totally
unchallenged.
Rhetorical exaggerations, hyperbole and platitudes are expected as part
of national political party show-and-tell time, but the public deserves
that they at least tell the truth.
Since the truth police did not do its job during the Democratic
convention, I will have to do it again this week at the Republican
convention.
Next week I will let you know the results.
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