Read My Lips: No New Jobs

(Picture from here.)

I read a lot of right wing propaganda.

By "propaganda" I mean what comes out of the mouths of right wing pundits, tea partiers and Goebbelian messages from the RNC. You know, things that don't manage to fully wrap around reality.

This is opposed to actual conservative dogma which has significant merits and is worthy of discussion. But that's not what I'm talking about today.

Besides the ceremonial casting out of those that don't fit the white, protestant, southern esthetic there is the drumming mantra that the right wing knows how to create jobs. Jobs is what it's all about. Remember? It's all about jobs, stupid.

Hm.

Well, the Republicans have been in charge most of the last thirty years. Let's look at their record.

The best graphic I found is the one shown above from a Washing Post article here. Condensed it is here:

• 1940s: Democrat, 72%
• 1950s: Mostly Republican, 51.3%
• 1960s: Mostly Democrat, 53.1%
• 1970s: Mixed, 38.1%
• 1980s: Republican, 34.9%
• 1990s: Mostly Democrat, 38.6%
• 2000s:Mostly Republican, 17.8% (0% according to some)

I'm pretty sure we can discount the 40s since there's this little thing called Word War II and coming out of the Great Depression.

The graphic at left (found here) points out that we had two, not one but two, recessions in the last decade. The first one could be discounted as caused by 9/11 although I think it's pretty clear it was solidly in the works prior to the attack. Certainly, one could think that the attack inhibited the recovery.

The point is, though, that the economy chugged right along independent of administration. The slope of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s were all pretty much the same.

However, one thing happened prior to the last decade that I would argue flattened the jobs prospect.

The first was the shipping of jobs out of country. This happened for a lot of reasons which I will not debate the merits of here but regardless of why we must agree it happened. The net effect of shipping a bunch of jobs overseas is that they're not here. Consequently, they cannot be counted upon as a job growth mechanism.

If one of the basic tenets of a government is to ensure the prosperity of its populace, we have to say our government fell down on the job as evidenced in the last decade.

Given a substantial portion of the last thirty years, and certainly most of the last decade, was in the hands of the Republicans it seems they inherit a significant portion of the blame.

Will they admit it?

Never.

Will we hold their feet to the fire?

Not in my life time.

Source articles:
Huffington Post
World Net Daily
Bloomberg Business Week
The Mortgage Reports
Washington Post