Demonkkkrat arguments tend to come down to, as Reagan put it, "know[ing] so much that isn't so".
Well, Reagan thought facts were stupid things. In my case, I try very hard not to say anything that isn't so. Can you identify anything I said that isn't true?
Well, that depends what his goal was. For example, if his intent was to explode the deficit, he succeeded. If his attempt was to keep Americans dying in Afghanistan for four years with nothing to show for it, he succeeded there, too. He also succeeded in driving up the unemployment rate and the murder rate. He succeeded in inspiring a mob of criminals to break into our Capitol, loot and vandalize property there, and beat down our police. He succeeded in running up a higher COVID death toll, per capita, than any other major nation. There are a great many successes he can claim, if those indeed were his goals (you never know, when it comes to a guy who was working for Putin).
The truth is precisely the opposite of what you just said here.
What makes you think that?
So skyrocketing gas prices are a "good result"?
In the short term, it certainly means more consumer hardship. In the long term, though, it drives higher efficiency, which means we'll get more GDP per unit of fuel. So, long turn I guess it could be good.
Stagflation is a "good result"?
We don't have that. As a reminder, we're coming off the best year in almost four decades for GDP growth.
Increased violence in Demonkkkrat cities is a "good result"?
No, the Trump murder wave of 2020 was decidedly not a good result. Hopefully we're going to be able to reverse that horrifying trend he left us with before too long.
Let's take a look at the April 2022 employment numbers (Source: BLS) as an example. In that release, it is stated that 428,000 jobs were added in April 2022. Good news, right??!!
Yes.
Wait a minute... Simultaneous to that, the reported number of people employed DROPPED by 363,000
You refer, of course, to the CPS survey, which isn't used for tracking employment levels from month to month, because it's too statistically noisy to be meaningful on that scale. Wingnuts have a tendency to notice the existence of the CPS report only in months when it tells them what they want to hear. Then they promptly lose track of it the second its noisy data is pointing the other way. Like how many wingnuts did you hear talk about the roughly 1.2 MILLION jobs supposedly added in January, according to the CPS report?
The funny thing is that the CPS data actually shows 2022 to be even stronger for job creation than the PAYEMS survey does. While PAYEMS says we've been averaging 519,000 jobs per month this year, which is already incredibly positive, the CPS survey says 533,000! But wingnuts don't cite CPS for the 2022 figure as a whole, since it doesn't tell them what they want to hear. They only look at single months, and only for those single months that happen to be pointing the direction they like. Then they wonder why they're treated like absolute clowns.
How does one reconcile this?
Statistical noise. Duh. While the PAYEMS report surveys 670,000 worksites, many with hundreds or even thousands of workers, the CPS survey only samples about 60,000 individual households and then tries to extrapolate from that. So, while PAYEMS gives you pretty consistent data month to month (e.g., 400k one month, 300k the next, 350k the one after), CPS is practically a random number generator at that scale (e.g., +736k in March, -363k in April).
Of course wingnuts totally get this when a Republican is president. At those times, they wouldn't treat a random bad month for CPS as a material thing. Like in October 2018, the economy supposedly lost 677,000 jobs, according to CPS. Did anyone panic? Did anyone even regard those as real job losses? Of course not. It's just statistical noise from extrapolating a figure from a small sample. Sure enough, the very next month showed +196k. Even right-wingers are smart enough to get this. They just pretend not to in convenient months when Dems are president. That's why we laugh at them. That's all they're good for.
