While getting ready to go to work this morning I was listening to James Carville complain about the recent rise in George Bush's (and America's) fortunes. As part of his argument that we're applying the "soft bigotry of low expectations" to the Bush administration he made the comment that the Stock Market is currently 10% below what it was when Bush took office. I grew a bit skeptical of that claim, so looked it up. It appears that the DOW closed at either $10,088 or $10,078, depending on whether we're talking about Clinton's last day or the first market day of Bush's term. Yesterday the DOW closed at $11,015. Using the CPI deflator that is $5976 and $5440 in 1983 dollars, respectively. Carville is right to the extent that the average is down (after accounting for inflation), but 0.6% is a lot different than 10%. Moreover, it's arguably unfair to make this comparison since Bush really wasn't able to influence the economy until Clinton's budget year ended, and that extended through the end of September, 2001. Not holding Bill accountable for the consequences of 9/11, on the day prior to the attack the DOW closed at $9,606, which deflates to $5388 in 1983 dollars. Either way one looks at it Carville wasn't even close. The stock market is either very modestly lower, or higher, than when Bush's watch began.
Note: For some reason both my adjusted index for Clinton and the calculation of the percent change were off, the latter by an order of magnitude. And I calculated it twice! Beware of calculators before morning coffee. At any rate the actual percent drop in the Dow was about 5.5% from Jan. 2001 to now. But again, if we use as our point of comparison the end of Clinton's policy domination of the market on Sept. 10, 2001 the market has actually gone up.
Bruce:
I'm afraid I inadvertently deleted you comment while I was cleaning comment spam. I'll repost it from the email below, and then comment:
I want to comment on your response to Michael Berube. Very good analysis, Scott. One point I would like to make regarding your comment that diversity is mostly found on college campuses. While that may be technically correct, it is my observation that diversity programs are found in most government agencies at all levels. If a government office does not have a Diversity person, it is because they have a Diversity Deparment. As time goes by, private businesses are adopting the same protacols. Larger companies almost universally have Diversity programs (really affirmative action programs by another name)with smaller and smaller companies following suit.
I agree. Although we didn't do an analysis of government offices, be did check for "diversity" on major business websites, and their references to "diversity" relative to the other watchwords (libery, democracy, freedom, equality) were second only to academia. As you say, the reason is that the programs were mandated in order to meet federal statutory requirements. However, they didn't actually have to use the term "diversity", which is ideologically loaded. It was just convenient to do so. Academia isn't under the same kinds of statutory requirements as business and government, of course.
By the way, are you the same Bruce Redding that used to hang around with Bill Ellston, Dick Reed and myself back in the day?
Posted by: Demosophist at June 22, 2006 04:12 PM