Once in a while, I come across a quote that is so ridiculous, I have to assume it was wrenched from context. Or that maybe the person was kidding. Or perhaps that the person to whom the quote is attributed is somehow mentally unbalanced.
For certain, at least two of these qualifiers weren’t the case this week when House Majority Leader Tom DeLay told the Wall Street Journal:
“[N]o matter what way you look at it, the American economy is the strongest it’s been in 10 years.”
If DeLay meant 10 months, it’d be a stretch but I’d let it go. But 10 years? Was he not paying attention in the ’90s?
I know quotes like these should be laughed at and then quickly forgotten, like most of DeLay’s nonsense, but let’s take a moment to review just how terribly out of touch with reality the House Majority Leader really is.
DeLay insists we have the strongest economy in a decade “no matter what way you look at it.” That’s an awfully broad assessment, which makes it easy to debunk, using some helpful data from the Center for American Progress.
For example, let’s say we want to look at the strength of the economy by employment numbers. It’s not a pretty picture. Eight million Americans are out of work and 2.6 million private-sector jobs have been lost since Bush was inaugurated. An unemployment rate that was 4.2% when Clinton left office is now 5.7%. Adding insult to injury, more than one million Americans have exhausted their unemployment benefits.
Or, maybe DeLay was referring to wages for working Americans. Could be, except wages are stagnating. From the beginning of the recession that started after Bush took office through the beginning of this year, wages have increased less than 1%.
As Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, explained in The American Prospect:
[I]nflation-adjusted wages are flat, at best, and are eroding for many workers. When jobs are short, it is inevitable that weekly and hourly wages grow more slowly as employers take advantage of the situation. The offshoring of white-collar jobs has only added to these pressures this time around.
Poor job performance and wage stagnation add up to very little growth in overall wage and salary income — what most of us live on.
Could DeLay have meant growth in the stock market? Probably not since the Dow Jones is lower now than when Bush took office. Maybe Americans’ access to health care? Nope, more than 43 million people still don’t have insurance — which is up considerably since 2001. How about the poverty rate? More bad news. The poverty rate was 8.7% in Clinton’s last year and rose to 9.6% in 2002.
Most likely, DeLay came to this conclusion based on growth in GDP. The fact is the U.S. did enjoy one very strong quarter (three months) last summer. But if we’re talking about the sustained strength of the economy, we should look at that quarter in context. As Mishel put it:
Somehow overlooked is the fact that the economy has grown more slowly (3.5-percent annual rate) in the first 11 quarters of this expansion than in those of the prior eight expansions (5.7-percent annual rate).
Even this morning, we’ve learned that first quarter growth this year fell well short of expectations.
So, “no matter what way you look at it,” DeLay is full of it. As usual.