From the lead editorial in Friday’s New York Sun:
The 7.2% growth rate that the Commerce Department has measured for the American economy in the third quarter of 2003 is stronger than anything ever achieved under President Clinton’s boom…The tax reductions on capital gains and dividends, along with the accelerated reductions in personal income tax rates, were signed by President Bush on May 28, 2003. These were pushed through by President Bush and the Republican Congress over the objection of Democrats like Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton, who voted against them. Every major Democratic presidential candidate wants to roll back these tax cuts. [NYSun]
Jerry Bowyer comments:
…some of President Bush’s most prominent bashers were claiming that we were in “the worst economy since Herbert Hoover.” That’s a little difficult, even for them, to say with a straight face when we’ve just finished our best quarter since the fourth year of President Reagan….Some have suggested that this growth rate is somehow related to the president’s “record high deficits.” Aside from the fact that they’re not record-high when you account for inflation and the size of the economy, this latest growth number owes nothing to the deficit, because it owes nothing to government spending. Government spending for the third quarter went up only 1.3%. Nor is this a war boom; defense spending was flat…. Some may also say that this is driven by inventory…. This does happen, but not today: inventories actually fell during the third quarter, as they have been falling during all of 2003. Yet sales remain strong.
…it’s the application of new technology to inventory management to the effect that companies no longer have to pile up a lot of inventory in times of recovery…To some degree, it’s an increase in retail consumption, up 6.6%. But to a much larger degree, this recovery is being driven by increases in investment, both business, up sharply at 14%, and residential, up double sharply at 20.4%. Now the reason this has happened is that Mr. Bush cut taxes. And when that didn’t work, he cut taxes again…. [NySun]
And as if that weren’t bad enough for the Democrats, they’re also getting killed by their own campaign finance legislation:
[F]inding people who will fork over, say, $25, $50, or $100 has became critical with the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, or McCain-Feingold, as it is more commonly known…. And even Democrats admit that Republicans have had a decades-long head start in getting small donors to write checks….[A]ccording to the FEC, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have collected a total of $133,861,490 in small hard-money contributions so far in the 2004 election cycle, while the corresponding Democratic committees have collected a total of $45,662,730. [NYSun]