Over at Angry Bear, pgl is feeling like a grumpy grizzly. The current object of his non-affection is a recent speech from Karl Rove that my friend-in-blogging considers "partisan garbage." I confess: I don't really consider it a high crime to be a partisan for the team of which you are a member. Heck, I don't even consider it a misdemeanor. But in this case I guess the operative word is "garbage", as in factual malfeasance. On this, I object.
To kick things off, pgl finds fault with this, from Mr. Rove:
The economy itself began slowing in the third quarter of 2000 as GDP declined by an annual rate of 0.5 percent. And all of this took place before George W. Bush set foot in the Oval Office.
On this point, I'm not really sure what the issue is. Here's a picture of growth in nonfarm employment covering the relevant period...
... and, importantly, a similar record for growth in investment spending:
It seems pretty clear -- crystal some might say -- that the downturn in the economy was underway in earnest by end of 2000 (a point I am particularly sensitive to because I was one of the people who missed it at the time). I certainly do not blame the Clinton administration or economic team for this turn of events. But nor do I think it unfair for Mr. Bush's folks to note that the horses had already gone by the time they walked into the barn.
From there, pgl goes on to complain about the job creation record of the past 5 years, citing his favorite statistic, the employment-population ratio, which (this is pgl speaking now):
... stood at 64.4% when Bush took office but was only 63% as of April 2006.
I like that statistic too, and there is no doubt that the pace of net job creation out of the trough of the 2001 recession was off-the-charts slow when compared to other recovery periods. Here is the chart often invoked to make the point:
In this picture, the number "0" indexes the level nonfarm employment at the beginning of a recession (or the average of recessions between the end of World War II and 1990, in the case of the blue line). Negative values mean that, at the indicated number of months since a recession's start, the total number of jobs is less than the level just before the recession began.
Note that the degree of job loss during the 2001 recession was totally unexceptional, and that the pace of job recovery in the current expansion does not start to look unusual until well into 2002. I have, in fact, argued that the seemingly poor performance in employment growth after 2002 is plausibly a consequence of structural change that has reduced the employment-to-population ratio associated with full employment. (You can find those arguments here and and here, for example.)
I admit that my position is debatable. Almost everything is, and that is exactly my point. In his speech, Mr. Rove goes on to say that President Bush's tax policies have helped the economy keep chugging along, that he has pursued a free-trade agenda, and that he has been a champion of budget discipline. On that latter point here, via Mark Thoma, is what Mr. Rove had to say:
The administration issued 39 veto threats... And Congress responded to those veto threats by restraining spending to the levels proposed in the president's budget. To put it mildly, the impact of the president's veto messages have been an unreported achievement.
Here's the thing about that statement: It invokes a counter-factual thought experiment that cannot be adjudicated by a simple appeal to what actually happened. The free-trade claim is a bit more amenable to objective analysis, but only insofar as we can agree to judge such on the basis of observable outcomes, such as number of treaties signed, growth in the sum of exports and imports, tariff reduction, or some such thing. As to Mr. Rove's comments about tax policy, I invite you to read the passage at Angry Bear and explain to me what part of what was said falls outside the limits of pretty standard economic argument.
It is not my intent to defend Mr. Rove or Mr. Bush on any of these points, much less endorse the administration's claims. My intent is to suggest that nothing in what is quoted at Angry Bear (or Economist's View) rises to a level that justifies referring to Rove's remarks as a "flat out lie."
I often tell students that the difference between a debate and a shouting match is that, in the former, each party presumes that the other is acting in good faith and allows that being wrong is not the same thing as being stupid or venal. The critics of this president's policies have plenty of very reasonable arguments for why Mr. Rove's claims are wrong. Bring on the debate.