Playboypenguin said:
You admire a company that presents itself as a fair and balanced national news organization that wants to deliberately lie to it's viewers and lead them like sheep to the slaughter?
As I said, in a perverse sort of way, yes. It's not that they simply
want to lie to its viewers; it's that they
freely admit it in court, confident that most of their supporters will never know (control the medium, control the message) and probably won't care even if they find out (there's a bigger villain, CNN/BBC/NYTimes/etc). The move is so arrogant that it's almost beautiful, like something a really good movie-villain might do.
So, yeah, I don't have to
like it, but I have to respect that they're able to get away with it.
sasquatch said:
Playboypenguin said:
And where has this growth been? Has it been in ways to strengthen the middle class or grow the lower class? has it caused the creation of livable wage jobs or is it solely benefited large corporations bottom lines?
It is a measure. It is a number. I guess you and Hillary get to spin it any way you want.
The problem is that something on the scale of an economy
can't be reduced to single numbers or measurements without losing a lot of accuracy. The reason that the numbers can be "spun" one way or the other is that they're only a quantification of an infinitely complex story. Is the economy improving? That depends on how you define the economy. Haliburton stock is up a little better than 3.5 times over in the past five years, so that's not bad. On the other hand, requests for help from food banks went up 12% in 2005
alone, which is. The GDP went up 3.4% in 2006, which was very respectable, but the percentage of Americans living in "severe poverty" ($5,080/year for one person to $9,903 for a family of four) was the worst than it had been for over
thirty years - to over sixteen million people, roughly the entire populations of Iowa, New Mexico, Washington, Alabama, and Alaska
put together - and that's very, very bad. I don't think the 2007 numbers are out yet, but given the credit collapse I'm not sure I'll like them.
So... is the economy doing well? In one sense, yes, yes it is. Is it doing terribly? In another sense, yes, again, yes it is. The numbers can tell both stories because both stories exist to tell. This reduction of an entire nation to "The economy is great!/The economy is terrible!" is misleading, but that's the product of a sound-bite culture for you. Personally, I'd like for us to start thinking in paragraphs again.
To drag in an obligatory firearms reference, it's a little bit like the lots-of-holes vs. flying-ashtrays debate. Sure, everyone would like lots of flying ashtrays, but we haven't quite figured that out yet, unless maybe you believe in the 10mm. You have to find the tradeoff that works best for you, and to do that you can't look at just one number.
The economy is like that. It isn't a single number and it can't be judged by a single measurement; it isn't a point, and I strongly suspect anyone who pretends it is - Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal - of being either oversimplistic or underinformed. It's a collection of curves and exchanges, and the arguments that really mean something are the ones about how those curves should be shaped. Much like arguments about the Castle Doctrine or the appropriate use of force, there are very few clear-cut answers, only questions about the kind of society we are and the kind we would like to become.
You can still call it "spin" if it makes you more comfortable.
