The mainstream media are so desperate to portray economic trends in optimistic terms that a lot of our current malaise is left unexplored. To repeat myself, I think this is especially the case with respect to unemployment. The scope of the suffering created by large-scale long-term unemployment has somehow failed to register. The real unemployment will never get in the books, so to speak, at least so long as a Democrat is president and an election is looming.
Scott Johnson's ODS complaint is based on this chart here:
And the red line, our current recession, is fairly classified as horrific. Johnson's theory is that since the zero point of the red line is December 2007, the job losses didn't get really bad until several months after that point. Johnson's theory is that the only possible explanation as the event that led to the massive plunge in job losses must have been President Obama's election, because there's nothing else that could possibly explain the...
...what's that you say? The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 that triggered the financial crisis and subsequent meltdown of the economy in 2009 could have played a part too? The key event that happened almost two months before President Obama was elected?
The sad part is these Power Line guys are supposed to be smart. We're really supposed to believe that Obama's election destroyed the economy before he could even take office, but Lehman's collapse and the Wall Street and housing market dominoes that fell as a result were all incidental at best to our job losses?
Please. I'm not saying Obama's policies haven't ameliorated the millions of jobs we have lost since then. But saying his mere election caused the problem is a bit like blaming lack of rain for a warehouse fire later ruled an arson. It's Obama Derangement Syndrome, pure and simple.
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