I am reminded of an Onion article from some years back, after the Saints–then the favorites to win the Super Bowl–lost to the Seattle Seahawks. The headline read: “Saints lose first round bye.”
The process of informational warfare is simple: create simple, easily understood statements–which in the case of Republicans will always have the advantage of not being patent falsehoods–and repeat them often and in unison. It is what our opposition does. They do it better, because successful long term lying requires a lot of planning and coordination, but we can learn the game. We need to learn the game.
I have created some numbers, with three columns. We have the year, the unemployment rate, and Federal spending. What you will note is that we spent 50% less than Obama for most of the last 20 years, and had MUCH lower unemployment. A strong case could in fact be made that the HIGHER the Federal spending, the higher the unemployment. You have to go back to the Great Depression and our last socialist President to string together multiple years over 9% unemployment. The unemployment numbers are here. The tax data numbers are here.
And to be crystal clear, the cuts due to sequestration are about $85 billion. Obama has increased spending $500 billion since 2009, which means that even with sequestration we are spending a TRILLION dollars, adjusted for inflation, more than Bill Clinton did. Wake the fuck up people.
| 1992 | 7.5 | 1.9 trillion |
| 1993 | 6.9 | 1.9 trillion |
| 19941 | 6.1 | 1.9 trillion |
| 1995 | 5.6 | 1.9 trillion |
| 1996 | 5.4 | 1.9 trillion |
| 19971 | 4.9 | 1.9 trillion |
| 19981 | 4.5 | 2 triliion |
| 19991 | 4.2 | 2 |
| 20001 | 4 | 2 |
| 2001 | 4.7 | 2 |
| 2002 | 5.8 | 2.2 |
| 20031 | 6.00% | 2.3 |
| 20041 | 5.5 | 2.4 |
| 20051 | 5.1 | 2.5 |
| 2006 | 4.6 | 2.6 |
| 2007 | 4.6 | 2.6 |
| 2008 | 5.8 | 2.7 |
| 2009 | 9.3 | 2.7 |
| 2010 | 9.6 | 3.1 |
| 2011 | 9 | 3 |
| 2012 | 8.14 | 3.2 |