Shadow Shot Sunday - 2/07

 

Swinging high and fast

Through the bright autumn sunlight.

What could be more fun?

Six Word Saturday 2-06

No snow here - storm missed us.

What the Hell?!? Friday -- Judgement to Rush

If you have an appetite for hate-filled, self-aggrandizing demagoguery, thrice divorced, Viagra toting, Hispaniola visiting misogynist Druggie Limbaugh never disappoints.


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This man is syndicated on over 600 radio stations, nation-wide, has over 20 million listeners, and influences the policies of the Repugnicant party.

We are SO screwed.

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Republicans, All Wrong, All the time, Pt 7.3: Once more, With Failing

All right, I put together another stupid cloud plot.  This time I'm indulging myself.  There can't be much point beyond that.

Here we have, once again, our favorite meaningless non-correlation plot.  Blue dots are points for Democratic presidents; red dots for Republicans.  X axis is Tax receipts/GDP in a given year, Y axis is GDP growth for that same year. Operating on the theory that if it's good enough for Econ. Prof. Lazear, it's good enough  for an old trombonist, let's twist this to serve our purposes. 

The red and blue horizontal lines are averages for the 36 years of Republican presidents and 24 years of Democratic presidents, respectively, from 1950 through 2009.  The slanty lines are best fits for Repug and Demo data sets. The vertical yellow line is Lazear's average of Tax/GDP, the magical 18%.

Note the Inconvenient 2009 point, labeled "What the Hell?!?  Low Tax/GDP along with NEGATIVE GDP Growth.  Don't you love it when a lie crashes and burns?

Some mathechistic stuff:

Demos

Avg.  GDP Growth   4.19%  St. Dev.  2.36

Slope of best fit line  -0.33  Correlation coefficient  -0.20

Repugs

Avg.  GDP Growth  2.77%  St. Dev   2.32

Slope of best fit line  -1.17  Correlation coefficient  -0.45

 Some iron-clad, indisputable conclusions:
1) The average growth of GDP under a Democratic President  is 1.4% higher than under a Republican.
2)  In 25 years, the level of GDP will be about 30% higher if we elect Democrats than it would be if we were  to be stupid and evil (I'm quoting O'Really here) enough to elect Republicans.
3) Never mind that the Standard Deviation of either data set is larger than the difference between their averages.  Shhhhhh!
4) Lazear's point is that high Taxes/GDP causes lower GDP growth.  Well, the correlation coefficient for Repugs is -0.44.  Sadly, this is a weak correlation, but it's more than twice as large as the -0.20 correlation coefficient for Demos.  So: if his premise has any validity (Remember, it doesn't) it is valid only when a Repug is in the White House.  When a Demo is in residence, the meaningless non-correlation, such as it isn't, crumbles.  Damn.
5) Oh.  Slopes.  For Repugs, -1.17.  For Demos, -0.33.   That's right, folks, the slope is 3.5 times greater with a Repug. See point 4.

Have I forgotten anything?  If so, please don't tell me.  I'm sick to the teeth of the whole damned thing.

UPDATE:  Here is part 7.2.


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Focus on Opimization

I have reproduced below, in its entirety, my post from September 9, 2009, titled, Republicans - All Wrong, All the Time, Pt 4.   What this illustrates is that a rising tide might float all yachts, but sometimes it swamps the dinghies.

As of 2008, wealth disparity was the greatest it has been since 1928.   Irrespective of whatever might be happening to GDP, Republican presidents thrust more people into poverty, Democratic presidents, even  Carter, get some people out of poverty.  The differences are stark.  Click on the chart to blow it up to a full page view.

 Update: Current productivity increases are stunning.  (From Delong again)

The flip side of the jobless recovery is a high productivity-growth recovery--and, with stagnant wages, a rise in the profit share...

Update 2:  The unemployment picture stays bleak.   But you knew that.
What do YOU think is happening to wealth distribution?

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Note the changes in the number of Americans living in poverty. The only big declines have happened during Democratic administrations. The first big decline on the chart was the result of the Kennedy/Johnson Great society. Nixon/Ford followed by Carter did little to affect poverty numbers. Reagan wasted no time in getting more people back into the chains of poverty. Though his irresponsible fiscal profligacy might have contributed to a slight decline after the initial surge, by the end of the Bush I term, poverty was almost back to the 1959 level. The next big decline in poverty occurred under Clinton. There was good and bad in the Clinton Presidency. This good thing was totally undone by Bush II.

Do you see any hope of this trend improving in the near future?

Note: I could only find an earlier version of this graph with data through 2007. So I grabbed the above chart from DeLong.

St. Ronnie and Shrub get the Lazear Treatment

I'm doing this to indulge J.  Don't ask me why.  At least its an excuse to post more graphs.


First, here is a close-up of GDP Growth, YoY from '76 on.

The snakey red and blue line is a 13 Yr. Exponential Average.

Yea Clinton, Meh Reagan, Boo Bushes.  'Nuff said?

I've also done the Lazear cloud plot for Reagan and Bush II.  The results are not remarkable.

 

X axis is (Tax Receipts)/GDP for a specific year.  Y axis is GDP growth in that year.

Red dots are Reagan data points, Orange squares, Bush II.

Green line is best fit to all points, slope is -0.93, correlation coefficient is -0.46.  Meh!  Slope is steeper than for the entire historical data set, due to Reagan's outliers.  Correlation is weak at -0.46, and almost the same as for the entire set.

Blue line is best fit, after eliminating the two extreme Reagan outliers, which are probably flukes, anyway.

Red line is fit to St. Ronnie data only, orange line ditto for Shrub.

Average GDP Growth for each is shown in pink: 3.40% for St. R; 2.16% for the weed.

With the caveat that the data set is too small to be statistically robust, and the data are cherry picked out of a larger set, what does this suggest?    

Some guesses:
1)  Reagan was far better than Bush.  He wasted money on star wars, mostly at home. Shrub wasted money spending it in Iraq, while simultaneously causing an oil price shock that badly harmed our economy.
2)  The cumulative effect of Republican economic policies is making it ever more dificult to grow GDP.
3) The GDP growth trend line over time is grim.  Barack Hoover Obama is not likely to make it any better any time soon.

And a speculation:
Those who call themselves "Conservatives" revere Reagan and old Goldwater (the OTHER Barry.)  Each of them would be decried as flaming Librullz by today's whacked out wingnuts.

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Republicans - All Wrong, All the Time, Pt 7.2

I took another look at Lazear's WSJ article that I so thoroughly pilloried in parts 7 and 7.1.  Quite frankly, it strikes me as being incoherent, but that's beside the point.  I was able to extract the conclusion that all of his foolish thought process seems to be driven by.  And note the sequence.  The conclusion drove the process.  I am fairly imaginative, but cannot construct any scenario where analysis of data could possibly lead to the conclusion that (Tax Receipts)/GDP inhibits GDP growth.  See my earlier posts.

Lazear posits:

The recent growth in spending has been camouflaged by a focus on deficits. Budgets and proposed legislation, like that on health care, are being judged not by their impact on spending and taxation, but by their projected effect on the deficit. Equal increases in spending and taxes reduce economic growth, even if they do not alter the deficit.

I added emphasis to the big lie he wants us to believe.  This isn't even very good mathematical chicanery.  I ripped it to shreds with nothing more than basic critical thinking skills, some Excel proficiency,  and a little bit of math knowledge.  Evidently right wingers - even those with teaching positions at highly regarded universities lack most of these.

Here is an afterthought.  I've often said that Clinton was the best Republican president since Ike.  I wonder though, if Ike might have actually been more economically liberal.  With Barack Hoover Obama, there can be no doubt.  He mainlines Reagan Koolaide.  The sad result is that Democrat is the new Republican.

So, what we can expect going forward is Republican-like economic performance from the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, Republicans have divorced themselves from reality.  Lazear is a prime example.  Beyond him you have the genuine loons: the Religious Right who derive from Jesus a message of hate, teabaggers who generate hate from their own infernal confusion engines, and the Reich-Wing  noise machine that constantly spews hate.

So, you see, on all fronts, we are pretty badly SCREWED.
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Haiku Wednesday

This is dedicated to Republicans, Libertarians, teabaggers, and all followers of Glenn, Rush, and Sean.

REALITY

When REALITY

Met IDEOLOGY, poor

REALITY lost!

Update: Dedicated to those who are tired of Winter.

It can be too cold,
Too dry, but REALITY
Is as right as rain!

Update 2:  Dedicated to those who feel uncertainty.

Reality is

Ambiguity, beauty

Maybe - and what else?

Republicans - All Wrong, All the Time, Pt 8

Having done more than my share over the last 24 hours, I'll just turn it over to Delong.

But I can't resist lifting this quote:

And, of course, left out of Hennessey's "analysius" is the explanation that the weakness of the economy is also the reason that the debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to climb over the next five years: the debt-to-GDP ratio ought to climb during periods of national emergency--resisting an invasion, fighting a major war, suffering a depression, et cetera. Hennessey and his peers in the George W. Bush administration share with the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations the singular distinction of having run the only administration to raise the debt-to-GDP ratio without resisting an invasion, without fighting a major war, without suffering a depression.

Republicans - All Wrong, All the Time, Pt 7.1

To further illustrate the idiocy of Ed Lazear's claims in his WSJ article, I've done some more playing with the numbers.  I also got a new data set for GDP growth, so values through 2009 are included, based on chained 2005 dollars. I also found estimates of  Taxes/GDP for 2009 of 15.1 and 15.4 %.  I used 15.4%, since the higher number favors Lazear's case, though the difference is decimal dust.

Republicans - All Wrong, All the Time, Pt 7

Brad Delong announts Ed Lazear as his stupidest man of the day, (item 9 at the link) noting that Matt Yglesias and Peter Orszag  called him out for misrepresenting this simple fact about the 2009 budget: it was devised by the Bush administration in 2008.  But, hey, it a WSJ article, so honesty is not a requirement, and reality is irrelevant.

But, for the current director of the Office of Management and Budget to have to correct the Chairman of the former administration's Council of Economic Advisers on how the budget is done seems a bit over the top, even in that context.

Mellow Yellow Monday - 2/01

Nate and Emily

In the play yard at the Mall

While Bumpa plays jazz

The lighting was poor, the acoustics were worse.
Not a great venue, but a fun time anyway.