Today's Must Read: It's the Economy, So Let's Lie About It

It was made clear to me some while ago that the economy does better under Democratic administrations. There are a number of reasons for this, the major one in my mind being that Democrats understand how our economy works, while Republicans understand how they think it should work. (That seems to be the prevailing right-wing mindset -- see "natural law" as an example.) There's an interesting post at Mahablog about a fairly recent study that lays out very clearly the Democratic vs. Republican record on the economy since World War II:

Last year some Princeton economists came out with a study that showed a rather startling gap between Dem and GOP administrations in how the economy performed, going back to World War II.

“The U.S. economy not only grows faster, according to real GDP and other measures, during Democratic versus Republican presidencies, it also produces more jobs, lowers the unemployment rate, generates higher corporate profits and investment, and turns in higher stock market returns. Indeed, it outperforms under almost all standard macroeconomic metrics.”

Strangely enough (hah!) the story somehow got mostly ignored in the "liberal" press. Not completely, but the spin from those who did note it is breathtaking:

But the two articles I found about this, one by Chris Matthews (the one linked above) and the other by Robert Samuelson, both go to great lengths to not give Dems credit for being better on the economy. Samuelson is particularly brilliant —

If Republican presidents were saddled with most recessions, their growth and job creation records would naturally be worse. And that’s what the Blinder-Watson study shows. Since the late 1940s, the economy has spent about 12 years in recession. But 10 of those 12 years occurred under Republican presidents; only two occurred under Democrats. On average, the economy spent slightly more than a year in recession for each Republican term and only three months for each Democratic term.

If only Republicans hadn’t been saddled with those damn recessions!

Talk about flipping reality on its head. . . .