Based on a transcript provided by NPR; my comments are in italics - I have bolded certain words for emphasis.
Transcript: Tea Party Response From Rep. Bachmann
The text of Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's response to President Obama's State of the Union address.
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Good evening, my name is Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota's 6th District.
I want to thank the Tea Party Express and Tea Party HD for inviting me to speak this evening. I'm here at their request and not to compete with the official Republican remarks. The Tea Party is a dynamic force for good in our national conversation, and it's an honor for me to speak with you.
Two years ago, when Barack Obama became our president,
unemployment was 7.8 percent ...
True, this was the BLS value reported in January, 2009, but this had been rising, over 3% points as a matter of fact from just in the past 11 months of the Bush administration; it went on to rise another 2% points under President Obama before leveling off and declining modestly.
However, most economists agree that there is at least a 6-month lag between any changes in fiscal or monetary policy and changes in unemployment, so to be fair, even ignoring the fact that a president's first few months are usually spent filling appointments and making as smooth a transition as possible instead of making radical changes, the jobless level President Obama inherited was really June, 2009's 9.5% since this would be the last to fully reflect Bush-era policies. Viewed with this proper skew, the rise in joblessness under Obama was modest compared to that of Bush, whose policies created the recession that Obama inherited. Blaming the new guy may be a good campaign strategy but it is not intellectually or economically honest.
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 3.8 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | |
| 2001 | 4.2 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.3 | 5.5 | 5.7 | |
| 2002 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 6.0 | |
| 2003 | 5.8 | 5.9 | 5.9 | 6.0 | 6.1 | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.0 | 5.8 | 5.7 | |
| 2004 | 5.7 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | |
| 2005 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.2 | 5.2 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | |
| 2006 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | |
| 2007 | 4.6 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 5.0 | |
| 2008 | 5.0 | 4.8 | 5.1 | 4.9 | 5.4 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 6.2 | 6.6 | 6.8 | 7.3 | |
| 2009 | 7.8 | 8.2 | 8.6 | 8.9 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.7 | 9.8 | 10.1 | 9.9 | 9.9 | |
| 2010 | 9.7 | 9.7 | 9.7 | 9.8 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.7 | 9.8 | 9.4 |
and our national debt stood at what seemed like a staggering $10.6 trillion dollars. We wondered whether the president would cut spending, reduce the deficit and implement real job-creating policies. Unfortunately, the
president's strategy for recovery was to spend a trillion dollars on a failed stimulus program, fueled by borrowed money.
This is dishonest at several levels. First, the President's strategy for recovery, as she calls it, was essentially a continuation of President Bush and Secretary Paulson's bailout-in-progress, 750 billion of which had already gone out the door when President Obama took office (he authorized continuation of the program and an additional several hundred billion, NOT the trillion dollars she implies).
Bachmann's choice of "failed" is dramatic but again difficult to justify. Many economists were predicting the collapse of the world's largest economy, a catastrophic melt-down in the banking and lending sector, and unemployment soaring past Great Depression levels of over 20%. The fact that unemployment appears to have topped out just a hair over 10% indicates that the stimulus may have indeed spared us the worst. Historians and economists will no doubt make careers arguing about whether it was true, true, and unrelated, or if Wall Street bankers oversold the "sky is falling" scenario to President Bush to get him to authorize the Paulson bailout, but whatever the case, it is far too early to call it a failure, and if so, it is unclear why she reserves all of her blame for the person who continued the bailout and none for the person who started it.
The term "fueled by borrowed money" is also misleading. At this point, everything the government does, including defense spending and tax cuts, are fueled by borrowed money. The implication is that had the stimulus not been continued, the government would not have needed to borrow money; this implication is patently false.
The White House promised us that all the spending would keep unemployment under 8 percent.
This is a naive and misleading statement. Without direct attribution, it is unclear to what specific speech or statement she is referring, but it is very unlikely that any policy maker in or out of the White House would have "promised us" anything. Only a fool would use such language in as uncertain a field as economic prediction. Most economists who are worth their salt will put confidence intervals around their projections and couch them in caveats (to a fault; this is what prompted Harry Truman to fume that he wanted a one-armed economist (because they all kept saying, "on one hand... but on the other hand...")). I remember no such reassurance; if it was made and Bachmann believed it, she is being naive.
Well not only did that plan fail to deliver, but within three months the national jobless rate spiked to 9.4 percent.
Once again, this is highly dishonest and frankly at odds with the chronology of the stimulus package. Michelle Bachmann is not an economist, so perhaps does not understand the lag between changes in policy and changes in the jobless rate, but she should be able to (or have a staff member show her) that the stimulus bill she declared as a failure did not actually pass Congress until the last days of January, 2009, and were not signed into law until February, so blaming a bill that had not passed yet for not nudging the unemployment rate down makes no sense.
The case the Republicans - none of whom voted for the additional stimulus - were making at the time, and that Bachmann reiterates now, is that somehow the Inauguration of President Obama CAUSED the continued surge in unemployment that was in full force when President Obama took office. Since President Obama did not make any radical changes financially, and the continuation of the Bush-Paulson bailout did not even start to take effect until February, there is simply no plausible mechanism by which President Obama could have single-handedly derailed the world's largest economy.
"Democrats’ goal is to have the stimulus package, which is roughly two-thirds new spending and one-third tax cuts, to Mr. Obama’s desk for his signature by Feb. 13, before Congress breaks for Presidents’ Day." - New York Times, 1/29/09
It hasn't been lower for 20 straight months. While the government grew, we lost more than 2 million jobs.
Again, this is a favorite Tea Party aphorism (big government = slower economic growth = higher unemployment), but the correlation between growth in the federal government and in government spending has been very weak, and she probably has the order backwards. Yes, there is usually a spike in government spending, deficits, and debt during recessions and economic slowdowns as tax revenue dries up while government spending on everything from unemployment benefits to Medicaid soar. President Bush (whom she hardly mentioned) oversaw a record increase in nonmilitary discretionary spending, but most of his job losses preceded rather than followed the bailout money he authorized.
Let me show you a chart: Here are unemployment rates over the past ten years. In October of 2001, our national unemployment rate was at 5.3 percent. In 2008 it was at 6.6 percent.
Why is she cherry-picking these numbers. Earlier, she stated (correctly) that the unemployment rate President Obama inherited was just below 8%. Now she has ratcheted it down to 6.6% so it is more dramatic juxtaposed against her punchline number...
But just eight months after President Obama promised lower unemployment, that rate spiked to a staggering 10.1 percent.
Again, the contrast here between what President Obama "promised" and the rate we actually suffered completely ignores the lag between changes in policy and changes in unemployment rate.
Today, unemployment is at 9.4 percent with about 400,000 new claims every week.
She is confusing two unrelated government reports. The unemployment rate is the percentage of households surveyed who report searching for a job in the past month, but not being able to find one. The new claims for unemployment insurance is a report, not a survey (every claim is reported), is highly volatile, and often out of synch with the unemployment rate. Even in a healthy economy, new claims for unemployment benefits rarely dip below 200,000, but this should not be alarming, since this is a dynamic pool (most unemployed enter, exit, and reenter several times over their work life). She is playing on people's economic ignorance (or reflecting her own) to make the numbers sound scarier than they are.
After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks,
I do not know if this number is accurate, but without a reference, I am not sure what to make of it. Is she implying that President Obama invented earmarks? How many earmarks were in a typical Bush era bill? We don't know because Bachmann does not bother to tell us, most likely because it would undermine her point and sound less dramatic.
many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money that we don't have. But instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt. It was unlike anything we have seen in the history of the country.
This is partially true but probably a function of the enormous size of the United States economy. As a percentage of GDP, we went into deeper debt during World War II.
Well, deficits were unacceptably high under President Bush, but they exploded under President Obama's direction, growing the national debt by an astounding $3.1 trillion.
It is unclear what she would have liked President Obama to do. The percentage increase in debt was much steeper under Bush than Obama, and there is precious little that Obama did different than his predecessor.
Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which will put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill.
This is gratuitously nasty and dishonest. It's easy to hate the IRS, but tying them into a healthcare bill that has not been implemented yet and that, last time I checked, was written and passed by Congress, not President Obama, completely contradicts both reality and what she just said. More effective enforcement of tax collection should be something Bachmann would support, since it helps reduce the "unprecedented explosion" of government debt. She is being completely dishonest when she ties the health care bill, which had not been passed and would not pass for over a year after the explosion in debt she moaned about, with this explosion in debt. The bipartisan CBO estimates the health care bill will reduce the deficit by over a hundred billion dollars. You can oppose the health care bill and you can oppose deficit spending, but it is illogical to oppose both.
Obamacare
Using this Tea Party buzzword is completely inappropriate for a lawmaker who should have a better understanding of the Constitution and the relative roles of the executive and legislative branches.
mandates and penalties may even force many job creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether, unless of course yours is one of the more-than-222 privileged companies or unions that has already received a government waiver under Obamacare.
twice in the same sentence, no less... This sentence makes no sense; a law mandating coverage does not "force" anyone to drop health insurance coverage. Certainly 59 million Americans, half of them employed, who have no insurance clearly work for employers who did not need "Obamacare" as an excuse not to insure their workers.
In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world's finest health care might be forced to rely on government-run coverage.
Now she has moved from the realm of intellectual sloppiness to outright lies. Healthcare reform is an all-private deal, not government-run coverage as she claims (in fact, opponents of healthcare reform are suing on the grounds that it IS private and that the government does not have the right (in their view) to force citizens to engage in PRIVATE commerce - apparently no one informed of this before she wrote her speech).
That could have a devastating impact on our national debt for even generations to come.
She is mixing apples and oranges and getting the issues all confused. Once again, healthcare reform, a private deal, NOT government-run, has been scored by the CBO and will REDUCE government debt, not increase it.
For two years, President Obama made promises just like the ones we heard him make tonight. Yet still, we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing.
I am not sure which time series to attack first, but unemployment was already covered and virtually peaked under Bush or Bush's policies with lag adjustment. Housing prices plummeted before Obama took office and gasoline is highly volatile but its price actually declined quite a bit for most of President Obama's administration. Surge in price is probably a reflection of a pick up in worldwide economic activity and hence demand, which should be a good thing. Perhaps Ms. Bachmann opposes economic growth, but this is strange considering it would increase tax revenues and drive down the debt, not to mention increase the profit the American taxpayer is realizing from all those preferred shares and warrants the stimulus money bought.
Well here are a few suggestions for fixing our economy:
- The president could stop the EPA from imposing a job-destroying cap-and-trade system.
- The president could support a Balanced Budget Amendment.
- The president could agree to an energy policy that increases American energy production and reduces our dependence on foreign oil.
- The president could also turn back some of the 132 regulations put in place in the last two years, many of which will cost our economy $100 million or more.
Is she serious? $100 million? If the cost of these new regulations, which could prevent another mine disaster or Gulf oil spill is only $100 million, a rounding error on the US debt, then I would say this is a very good deal. I am not sure how many regulations are normal to pass over 2 years, nor how many regulations were retired (if a new regulation replaces an old, there is no new net regulation). She doesn't tell us, but I would imagine if her research were as poor in this area as in the others, this is a meaningless number.
- And the president should repeal Obamacare and support free-market solutions, like medical malpractice reform
as much as I support medical malpractice reform, it is ludicrous to juxtapose it against healthcare reform; the implication, false once again, is that medical malpractice is a major drag on our healthcare system. It definitely adds costs, directly and indirectly, but the most realistic estimates are that no more than 1% of the cost of healthcare could be saved by aggressive malpractice reform. There are other reasons besides financial ones to reform runaway tort costs, but it is unclear how such a reform could be called free market, since trial lawyers soliciting clients with billboard appeals is the logical result of free markets (greed gone wild). The lure of getting a third of a multi-million settlement or jury award has enriched far too many attorneys to call this anything but capitalism on steroids. Having the government intervene in this market and set arbitrary caps on awards is the type of government intervention Bachmann otherwise claims to oppose (on principle). Although I support such caps, let's call them what they are: government interference in the marketplace whose end products - trial lawyers and pornographers remind us - are not always inherently good.
- and allowing all Americans to buy any healthcare policy they like anywhere in the United States.
Believe it or not, I agree with this pooling of insurance plans across state lines. Funny though that the Republicans never once advanced this idea when they controlled Congress and the White House.
We need to start making things again in this country, and we can do that by reducing the tax and regulatory burdens on job creators. America will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Think about that.
I don't know what it is I am supposed to think about. When exactly will it have this rate? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? If the only thing between us and prosperity is taxes, why did the most dramatic series of tax cuts in United States history leave us both with record debt AND one of the worst recessions ever? Why, if tax cuts failed so miserably to stimulate the economy, would more of them help now?
Look no further to see why jobs are moving overseas.
This is economic idiocy in its most purified form. I cannot tell whether she really believes this stuff or simply does not know. First, most of the jobs moving overseas are being shipped there by US-headquartered companies who will continue to pay the same corporate tax, regardless of where their labor happens to reside. Jobs are moving overseas because it is very profitable to the corporations to move them there because labor costs are generally much lower. Second, since she indicates corporate tax rates WILL be higher (when? how high?) why would jobs already have moved overseas? If she is establishing causality, she must first establish a temporal relationship.
But, thanks to you, there's reason for all of us to hope that real spending cuts are coming. Because last November you went to the polls and you voted out big-spending politicians and you put in their place great men and women with a commitment to follow our Constitution and cut the size of government.
I believe that we are in the early days of a history-making turn in America. Please know how important your calls, visits, and letters are to the maintenance of our liberties. Because of you, Congress is responding and we are just starting to undo the damage that's been done the last few years. Because we believe in lower taxes. We believe in a limited view of government, and exceptionalism in America. And I believe that America is the indispensable nation of the world. Just the creation of this nation itself was a miracle. Who's to say that we can't see a miracle again?
The perilous battle that was fought during World War II in the Pacific at Iwo Jima was a battle against all odds,
Actually it was perilous but it was certainly not "against all odds." About 70,000 Americans attacked about 18,000 Japanese. The island was subjected to incredibly fierce naval bombardment for days before the Marines went ashore. The main shock of the battle was that the Japanese fought so tenaciously (it was the first of the Home Island invasions). The Japanese defense was so effective that the US Marine Corps lost more men on Iwo Jima than in its entire history. The casualties were so high that it gave impetus to those who wanted to drop an atomic bomb on Japan, who argued that if the Japanese defended this miserable atoll so fiercely their defense of their homeland proper would lead to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of United States casualties.
and yet this picture immortalizes the victory of young GIs over the incursion against the Japanese.
I do not understand how you can have a victory "over" an "incursion" against the Japanese. This sentence makes no sense and seems to imply that Bachmann is as confused about World War II history as she is about economics and logic. The Marines who defeated the Japanese were now invading their territory, not the other way. It was at the tail end of a war that had begun with Japanese expansionism but the Japanese had been beaten back to the status quo ante bellum. The United States decided to invade Japan to demand Total Victory.
This has to go under the What On Earth Does This Have to Do With Anything category. Who are the Japanese in this analogy? If reducing the deficit and debt are a great generational trial demanding any sacrifice, is it asking too much to roll back tax cuts for the rich that helped get us in this mess? Or is Obama Japanese, and defeating this "totalitarian aggressor" the brave American warriors can reclaim their rocky atoll?
And since America is currently engaged in not one war but two, why not praise the virtues of Americans fighting today? In fact, why ignore the two wars, one elective and tragically unnecessary, that had so much to do with the fiscal and economic crisis Obama inherited and Bachmann bemoans?
These six young men raising the flag came to symbolize all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor.
Our current debt crisis we face today is different,
so the debt is the Japanese? I still don't see the analogy. Since we raised marginal income tax rates to 90%, is she prepared to make a similar sacrifices today?
but we still need all of us to pull together. But we can do this. That's our hope. We will push forward. We will proclaim liberty throughout the land.
From what? Did we lose it? Is she Paul Revere now?
And we will do so because we the people will never give up on this great nation.
Now I'm completely lost. Who said anything about giving up on this nation? We are in debt, not occupied or torn apart by a Civil War. This is a solvable problem with a real world solution. It is a problem of our creation, unlike the totalitarian threat she likens it to.
So God bless you, and God bless America.
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