COMMENTARY

Rousing rabble in 3, 2, 1 …

One certain way to rile the Obama-disdainers of Arkansas, a massive potential readership, is to relate indisputable facts.

I refer to empirical data demonstrating the fine job this president has done in getting the deficit down and the economy up.

Today’s calm, modulated and numbers-supported exercise in simple truth-telling will, I predict, generate a record number of profanity-laced and epithet-hurling emails.

Commie, socialist, statist, atheist, participant in minority-practice sex acts or unnatural ones, all of multisyllabic reference — these compose the prevailing language and raging wisdom of rebuttal whenever I bring up Barack Obama’s solid job performance.

So let’s get factual and riled.

In January 2009 when Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent and the economy had just sustained a monthly loss of more than 800,000 jobs.

Today, the unemployment rate is 6.1 percent and the economy has just experienced a one-month increase of 288,000 jobs, the fifth straight monthly job gain of more than 200,000 jobs.

In January 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial averages slipped below 8,000. It dropped more than 300 points on the day of Obama’s inauguration.

At 1 p.m. Thursday when closing for the holiday weekend, the Dow was higher than 17,000. That’s a heap of equity-adding for the investor class and the retirement savers.

In 2009, Obama felt a need to stimulate the economy — or at least put a floor under it. For that reason, he ran up the deficit to more than $1.5 trillion from the nearly $1 trillion he inherited from George W. Bush, who’d run it up with bailouts.

Today, the deficit projection for the current fiscal year, made in April by the Congressional Budget Office, is just under $500 billion. That’s down a mere trillion dollars since 2009 and the utter mess that Bush bequeathed.

Housing starts were perilously below a half-million a month in 2009. They exceed a million per month now.

Housing values are generally well-up since the bubble bursting of 2009, if geographically spotty and erratic in the short term.

All of that is to say that, under Obama, your job opportunities are steadily greater, your 401(k) balance is steadily climbing, your home value is likely back up and the trend-line of your federal government’s debt compilation is steadily downward.

My, what an awful president.

Because these are matters of economics and political philosophy, credible disagreement will always exist.

Obama’s detractors — not necessarily disdainful ones — can and will say that the unemployment rate is down in part because the work force has contracted from people giving up on seeking work.

Indeed it is statistically so that the work force has shrunk through a basic remaking of the job market since the meltdown of 2008. But you can’t have that statistic without acknowledging the more than a million jobs created for those actually looking for work over the last five months.

Obama’s detractors — not necessarily disdainful — scoff that Obama should get credit for reducing the deficit from the record size to which he ran it in 2009 with the stimulus.

But it’s also down from where it stood when Bush left office. And, either way, the trend line is positive. Most economists will tell you the deficit needn’t disappear abruptly, for that would be too drastic, but merely must get brought down steadily.

Obama’s detractors — not necessarily disdainful — will say the debt is still piling up. That’s true. As long as there is an operating deficit, we will add more to the debt than we will be able to pay down. The point is that the debt is piling up at a slower rate than it was, because the annual operating deficit is less.

Obama’s detractors — not necessarily disdainful — will say that the Federal Reserve, by printing money and holding interest rates low, is more responsible than he for this uncertain recovery.

That might be so. Actually, I’m inclined to think that it is so, at least to a significant extent. No president could succeed in economic policy if the Federal Reserve was reckless and incompetent.

But Obama’s detractors ought to ask themselves whether they’d excuse him the blame for bad economic news in the way they deny him the credit for good economic news.

That may be the real political story. The venerable Gallup survey shows that something new began happening during the presidency of George W. Bush and continues to Obama.

It’s that persons of the opposite party started giving the president no credit for economic good news, though they continued to bestow blame on him for bad news.

Through Bill Clinton’s presidency, Americans tended to judge political performance on the economy by their pocketbooks. But now they base their judgments of political performance on the economy by their ever-more malignant biases.

It’s no great revelation that people are more politically polarized than ever. But it’s a bit of a startling new angle that they’ve come to value their own political partisanship more than their own billfolds or purses.

That sounds like Tom Cotton, who wants to blow up our economy — take our “strong medicine” of a “market correction” now — to advance his partisan political agenda.

Maybe he’s a young man for his time.

Or maybe we need a renewed emphasis on that thing Clinton talked about. What was it?

Oh, yes. Arithmetic.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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