quadraphonics said:
I think you're overstating the importance of the labels. The last time I recall a recession actually affecting a political outcome was in 1992
You don't think the .com crash of 2000 affected Gore's prospects? I certainly do. What are the Democrats saying about McCain? "Four more years of Bush". Well that stings a whole lot more if we are in a recession come October than if Q3 growth is 4%, unemployment is dropping again, and the Dow is at 14,000. Gore had the tough job of trying to build on Clinton's economic success while distancing himself from the man - and that strategy died when the economic success disappeared just before the election.
...and what did it was the economic fact of the recession, not the label itself.
Sure, but that's exactly the point: the late 80s to early 90s recession was a
serious recession.
-It was preceded by the worst stock market day ever that took
two years to recover.
-It saw the unemployment rate spike to around 7.7%
-1990 was an overall negative gdp growth
year.
That's why it was easy to apply the label then. And it is
not easy to apply the label today because "the economic fact of the recession" is that (like the one in 2000-2001), what we are in now is
extremely mild - so mild that there is ambiguity over the applicability of the label.
People are motivated by their pocketbooks, not the labels that pundits apply. Refusing to label the current downturn a recession is not going to make Hillary Clinton's populist posturing any less effective with the Rust Belt crowd. All it will accomplish is to convince said voters that you are out of touch with their lives. I guess what I'm saying is that popular confidence (or lack thereof) in economic prospects is largely a grassroots phenomenon, driven by the actual on-the-ground performance of the economy. Playing word games with statistics can have a short-lived, marginal effect, but it's not going to change any fundamentals.
But that's just it - if the whateveryouwanttocallit is only affecting a relatively small fraction of the population, then trumpeting it in speeches will only work on
those people and it won't work on everyone else. If you can, legitimately, call it a general recession, people have no choice but to acknowledge that it could affect everyone. Right now it can legitimately be said to be mainly affecting a relatively small segment of the economy. As a result, people just won't buy it. The democrats truly need this to be a no-doubt-about-it recession, lasting into the fall in order for that to play well in the general election.
Okay. Is there anyone serious who thought that we wouldn't recover? This kind of thing happens every 5-10 years or so. You seem to be arguing against some kind of hypothetical pessimist/doomsayer position that I don't see represented here.
You're relatively new to this thread. People here have been prediction an extended, deep downturn - a true economic disaster - looming. This was to be the start of it. And that's not hyperbole, they really do mean it.
Now actual predictions are tough to pin down, but the general point I keep harping on is simply that overall,
we are seeing unwarranted pessimism. And it isn't just this thread. I posted an article that came out two days before the Q1 GDP numbers. The prediction from a general survey of economists was .1% Q1 growth, when we actually saw .6%. The media and liberal politicians are pumping-up the negativity and people here buy into it. And what is dangerous about that is that the economy runs on optomism. Negativity can become self-fulfilling.
)