Time to play "whack a talking point" once again.
Over and over the DeVos people have implied that the country's economic condition is going great, oh boy, let's party, peaches and cream and the streets lined with gold for everybody else, it's only you people in Michigan that are suffering. This has been the main thrust of Dick's campaign: because he can't tell you his radical plans for our state, he will continue to hammer on our economy. To do this, they must leave the impression that only you are being deprived, everyone else in America is living the life of luxury.
Not true.
John Kerry was in Detroit to stump for Granholm yesterday, and he had a few things to say about the Bush administration and the outsourcing of manufacturing and other policies. Truscott, in response to the Senator's remarks, came up with this-
DeVos spokesman John Truscott said, "We expect them to continue their campaign of attacks and misinformation" and that Granholm is "welcome to bring in whoever she wants. It can't cover for the fact that Michigan is in a single-state recession. The rest of the country is doing just fine."
Neat trick. Or, a cheap trick, actually. Accuse your opponent of "misinformation" and in the next breath offer some "misinformation" of your own. It's so... oh, what's the word... Rovian.
Johnny is perpetuating a myth. The "economy" is too big of a subject to really tackle in a blog post, but here are just a few examples of the "Bush recovery" and how it has affected the country-
(first of all, a hat tip to bonddad at Kos for all his excellent economic work. If you need any figures on this economy, he has them. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude here because I'm not so good with the math-e-matics. Most of the information here has been complied by him, I threw a few other things in.)
Let's start with mortgage foreclosures-
RealtyTrac, a California organization that tracks foreclosed properties nationwide, found that the foreclosure rate in March of this year was up 63 percent compared with last year. The company's foreclosure data includes a variety of categories: homes that enter the foreclosure process, homes that are actually foreclosed on and homes that are returned to the banks.
And specifically, on defaults-
RealtyTrac, an industry organization that maintains a nationwide database of foreclosures, says mortgage defaults between January and March of this year numbered 323,102 compared with 188,122 during the same period last year -- an increase of 72 percent.
This is happening all over the country, not just Michigan. For more figures on housing nationwide, check his original diary here, and
indications are that this segment of the economy is starting to slow way down as interest rates rise. Trouble looms ahead if this is true-
Housing is responsible for a conservative 30% of establishment job creation since November 2001. According to a Merrill Lynch analysis, housing is responsible for about 50% of total US economic growth.
So much for your house, on to your bank account. If the economy is so wonderful in this country, why aren't you making more money?
Turns out your boss is getting rich. That trickle down will start any... second... now...
Median 2005 pay among chief executives running most of the nation's 100 largest companies soared 25% to $17.9 million, dwarfing the 3.1% average gain by typical American workers, USA TODAY found in its annual analysis of CEO pay.
Bonddad explains that the 3.1% gain is not what actually has happened for American workers.
Memo to the USA Today: Please adjust your figures for inflation.
Now...onto the show. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, non-supervisory wages (which represent about 80% of the population) increased from $15.88 in January 2005 to $16.35 in December of 2005 for an increase of 2.95%. Over the same period, the inflation figure increase from 190.7 to 196.8 for an increase of 3.1%. So using the BLS numbers gives non-supervisory employees a net decrease of .15 in wages and using the UA Today figure gives the average American an increase of 0. Wow, that's really impressive.
And as corporations are raking it in...
U.S. corporate profits have increased 21.3% in the past year and now account for the largest share of national income in 40 years, the Commerce Department said Thursday.
Strong productivity gains and subdued wage growth boosted before-tax profits to 11.6% of national income in the fourth quarter of 2005, the biggest share since the summer of 1966.
For all of 2005, before-tax profits totaled $1.35 trillion, up from $1.16 trillion in 2004 and just $767 billion in 2001.
... labor is getting stiffed.
Meanwhile, the share of national income going to wage and salary workers has fallen to 56.9%. Except for a brief period in 1997, that's the lowest share for labor income since 1966.
How do they keep wages down? They keep job growth down. Bush's job creation record is dismal.
Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley has labeled this recovery the jobless/wageless recovery. He has a strong point on both of these fronts. Bush's .6% compound annual growth rate for establishment jobs is still the weakest of any president in the last 40 years. The March labor participation rate was 66.1%, which is near the low range of the 1990s recovery. This indicates a large percentage of people are simply sitting on the sidelines. Barring an economic miracle, this trend of weak establishment job growth is already set in stone.
Low unemployment numbers have not increased wages, as is usually the case. Remember the late 90's?
According to standard economic analysis, a 5% unemployment rate is full employment. At that level of unemployment - so the conventional thinking goes - companies will have to increase wages to attract employees from a dwindling supply of labor. However, that hasn't happened. Companies don't feel compelled to offer wage increases beyond inflation. This indicates the economy is probably not at full employment.
Back at home, for most Americans personal debt is soaring as savings are being depleted.
Domestic household debt grew 11.6% in the first quarter of 2006. Since 2003, growth of household debt has increased over 11% each year. In November 2001, at the beginning of this expansion, total household debt was $7,568.1 trillion or 74% of GDP. In the first quarter of 2006, total household debt was $11,840 trillion or 91% of GDP. That's a compound annual growth rate of 11.10%. Mortgage related debt increased from $4,871.9 trillion to $8978.3 trillion over the same period, making this increase responsible for 87% of the increase in total household debt.
At the same time, personal savings was negative - again. This time the figure came in at (-)$119.8 billion. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of negative savings. At the same time, undistributed corporate profits were $606.3 billion - a three-fold increase since 2001's figure of $192.3 billion. In other words, corporations are saving a ton of cash.
As far as "doing fine" in the big picture goes -seems it has been a "credit card recovery", for both the country and it's citizens. The Bush administration has borrowed record amounts of money, driving the national debt to it's highest level ever and forcing us to raise the debt ceiling four times in the past five years.
Like many cash-strapped Americans who have maxed-out credit cards, the federal government has hit its limit for borrowing funds to keep operating. If the limit isn't raised, the government likely will run out of borrowing authority within days, risking a shutdown.
When President Bush took office five years ago, the national debt was at $5.6 trillion; since then, big budget surpluses have collapsed into huge deficits, and the debt has shot up nearly 50 percent.
Borrow a boatload of money and call it a recovery. Sounds like a plan! Maybe no one will notice.
Oops! Looks like they did. According to a FOX news poll in April, 72% of the country thinks the economy is fair to poor, and a recent poll by the Washington Post/ABC News put the economy second to the Iraq war as being the voter's main concern, with 61% of the respondents disapproving of the way Bush is handling the economy.
How can that be? Is this what Truscott means when he says, "the rest of the country is doing fine?" Why are people so concerned if that is true?
Now all DeVos has to do is convince Michigan residents that the Bush economic plan is working everywhere so he can do the same thing here: cut taxes on the rich, increase corporate profits and stop wage growth, bleed the average citizen dry, and don't forget about cutting off the poor from any sort of assistance as poverty and the homeless and the uninsured numbers keep increasing.
After all, when all is said and done, after he takes us down this path and destroys the state, he can then turn around and blame Granholm for his failures, just like the Bush people blamed Clinton. The script almost writes itself sometimes.