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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (2100)	12/9/2003 5:58:56 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Citing layoffs is a classic example of subtraction without addition. Job growth in the U.S. virtually always begins with small start up businesses which grow and add employees. My wife started a business last year; now she has 15 employees. Two years back, many of those 15 people were laid off by somebody. Reciting anecdotes or even statistics of layoffs counts the person when they lose the job but ignores them when they find another job. Another example: The largest employer in the United States in the private sector, last time I checked, is Wal Mart. When I was in college I worked at a Kmart for awhile. At the time, KMart was nipping at the heels of Sears as America's largest retailer, and Wal Mart was a small regional player in Arkansas and other parts of the Midwest. Kmart and Sears had large workforces; Wal Mart did not. Over the years, both K Mart and Sears have laid off tens of thousands of people. Wal Mart has added hundreds of thousands of people doing largely the same things that the Kmart and Sears people were doing. If I read the layoff notices a bunch of people lost their jobs. If I look at the overall numbers unemployment hasn't gone up, because so many other people were hired by a company that was a start up three decades ago. I cited Ohio's statistics to you. Ohio's unemployment rate has gone from 6.3 to 5.6 percent in four months. When Bill Clinton was poising to run for reelection, at precisely this same time 8 years ago, Ohio's unemployment rate went from 4.8 percent (in Nov. 1994) to 5.8% (in November 1995). He still won Ohio. It is simply false, outright false, to portray the 5.6% unemployment rate under Bush in Ohio as some dramatic and horrendous situation that will sound the death knell for his reelection chances. New businesses start in Ohio every day. Many of them hire people that Key Bank and Trimble, and Newell Rubbermaid, no longer need. I really don't see why you feel the need to deny that unemployment in Nov. 2003 in Ohio is lower than it was in November 1995 when Clinton had been President for 3 years. I don't see any need for you to deny that in 1995 unemployment in Ohio had been trending upwards for a year, whereas now it is trending downwards. Those are facts. The fact that you got on the phone or the Net and talked to somebody at a couple of companies that aren't hiring is really pretty meaningless in the context of the overall economy of Ohio. Here, maybe this will help: dummies.com