Kerry Loves Misery

Kerry Loves Misery

Rush et al. have this one right: if it's bad news for America, it's good news for Kerry and the Dems.

Here's a story about Kerry's trumped up "Misery Index" - the 2004 version.

FOXNews.com - You Decide 2004 - Kerry Economic Plan Relies on Safe Numbers

WASHINGTON - Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (search) unveiled his own version of the 'misery index' on Monday, claiming Americans are miserable because President Bush has done such a bad job with the U.S. economy.

And now a word from Factcheck.org:

FactCheck.org: Kerry's "Misery Index" Accentuates the Negative

The original ‘misery index’ is simply the jobless rate added to the inflation rate. The term was coined by economist Arthur Okun, an economic adviser in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. It was widely used during the "stagflation" of the '70s and '80s when stagnant economic growth kept unemployment high and inflation reduced the buying power of wages.

By that classic misery measure the country is faring better than average under Bush: the unemployment rate for March was 5.7% -- which is just 0.1% above the average for all months since 1948. And the inflation rate remains historically low – the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index rose only 1.7% in the 12 months ending in February, the most recent month on record. So the classic “misery index” number is currently 7.4.

That's lower than it's been in all but 20 of the previous 56 years on record. It never got this low during any of the years under Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Bush's father.

And the classic "misery index" was higher in every one of Clinton's first four years than it has been in any of Bush's years. It was not until Clinton's second term that the long economic boom of the 1990's pulled the index down to below its current level. . . .

So it's not surprising that the Kerry campaign has come up with another way of looking at the economy. On April 12 Kerry issued a news release saying "Middle-Class Misery Hits Record Under George Bush," based on a new index put together by former Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling and former Al Gore adviser Jason Furman.

The Kerry index is, to put it mildly, selective.

Rather than use all consumer prices, the Kerry index cherry-picks three items that have gone up faster than the overall rate of inflation: college tuition (at public four-year universities only), gasoline, and health care.

And rather than use the overall unemployment rate -- which was 5.5% at this point in Clinton's first term, only two-tenths of one percent lower than now -- Kerry has used the number of jobs, which produces a more negative picture.

Other statistical indicators chosen by Kerry are median family income and bankruptcies, which have both worsened under Bush, and home ownership -- the only one of the seven indicators in the Kerry index to show improvement. . . .

Contributing the most to the gloomy picture presented by Kerry's index is college tuition. Kerry aides used only the figure for four-year public colleges and universities, which has shot up 13% under Bush, even after adjusting for inflation. But they excluded tuition for private colleges and universities, which went up only 5%. (Both figures are from the College Board's annual survey of college costs.)

When it came to measuring the change in employment, however, the Kerry aides focused on the loss of private sector jobs only, not total employment. That ignored gains in hiring of local, state and federal workers. The economy has lost 2.6 million private-sector jobs since Bush took office, but government hiring has kept the total job loss to just 1.8 million. The Kerry index uses the larger figure, making their index look worse.

This from the semi-neutral Factcheck.org.

Of course, the story about Kerry fumbling the numbers just wasn't enough. Here's their final paragraph:

Kerry isn't the only one spinning economic figures, of course. We pointed out earlier a Republican attempt to claim that after-tax income was up when the Census Bureau reported it was down. Our advice: be wary of all politicians spouting economic statistics.

They just couldn't resist.