The lousy economy is everywhere!

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Except where Republican delegates happen to live..

The cognitive dissonance is awe inspiring, and the efforts to square are hilarious. From Politico

CEVELAND — Tuesday night’s Republican convention theme was officially Make America Work Again, echoing Donald Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric about the U.S. economy under President Barack Obama. “The president has been regulating to death a free-market economy he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand,” the GOP platform declares.

The delegates here have varying degrees of enthusiasm for Trump, but they all seem to agree the Obama economy is a ghastly mess. Except for the economy wherever they happen to live.

“Actually, we’re doing great,” says Donna Gottschall, a human resources consultant in Greenville, S.C.

“Employment’s up. Housing’s up. Everything’s green in Greenville!”

“Oh, yeah, unemployment is way down,” says Al Baldasaro, a state legislator and retired Marine from Londonderry, N.H.

“Obviously, it’s gotten better.” “Things are wonderful in our town,” says Ranae Lentz, a Republican county chair from Bellefontaine, Ohio. “We can’t fill all the job openings.”

They square that circle in a variety of ways — crediting their Republican mayors and governors, accusing Obama of manipulating data, or citing legitimate weaknesses in the recovery from the Great Recession. But with unemployment down from 10 percent to less than 5 percent since late 2009, one of Trump’s many challenges will be convincing non-Republicans that America isn’t working even though nearly 15 million more Americans are. 

Still, in interviews in Cleveland, Republican delegates repeatedly described economic gains that seem ordinary in national context as hometown anomalies. Jeanita McNulty, a liaison for foreign exchange students in Blue Grass, Iowa, attributed the strong local labor market to a Republican governor and small-town values. “Iowans work hard,” she said. “There’s a lot of real pride in the Midwest.” 

Tina Harris, a longtime realtor in Palm Harbor, Florida, told me the housing market is “booming.” But she argued that this was a troubling data point, because buyers were liquidating their 401(k) accounts and taking money out of the “real economy” to purchase homes. “Have you checked your 401(k) lately?” asked her friend Nancy Riley, another veteran realtor in the St. Petersburg area. I said I hadn’t, but I did know the stock market had just hit an all-time high, and I didn’t see why jobs in construction and real estate like theirs shouldn’t count as the real economy.

Again and again, delegates said they didn’t trust the official unemployment figures, or that the “labor participation rate” (which has declined under Obama, largely because of baby boomers retiring) is more important, or that the new jobs are only part-time, when in fact part-time employment has been flat.

Dub Harris, the owner of a 1,000-acre cotton farm in Stamford, Texas, says the state is doing well overall, despite the ongoing slump in oil prices. But he says the strict Wall Street regulations that Obama passed in the wake of the financial crisis have had a brutal effect on young farmers, forcing banks to foreclose at the first sign of trouble, rather than letting borrowers work their way out of trouble. “We’re seeing wonderful young men, the first in church on Sunday and the first in the fields on Monday, they miss their first crop and the banks have to take their land,” Harris said.

“It’s overregulation, and it’s killing us. Every country that goes down the socialist track fails, and Obama has done that on steroids.” In his thick West Texas drawl, Harris also complained about the Federal Reserve’s loose-money approach, which has weakened the dollar, but he also complained that the dollar is too strong, which has hurt agricultural exports.

GOP Delegates Say the Economy Is Terrible—Except Where They Live - POLITICO Magazine

Overregulation when banks want you to pay back loans? Perhaps we should go back to the days when everybody could get a mortgage, we know how that ended though..

Basically the problem is this..

In fact, the most common economic critiques I heard from delegates — more common than taxes, trade, unemployment, the national debt, or immigration — were variants of Mitt Romney’s “free stuff” critique of Obama, the notion that Obama is expanding the welfare state for lazy moochers.

the notion that America isn’t working has more to do with what the president did than whether it worked. It’s a Republican article of faith that his policies couldn’t work—and therefore haven’t worked.

Randy Ellis is a commissioner in Roane County, Tennessee, and many of his constituents rely on the government laboratory in Oak Ridge for their livelihoods. He says the local economy is vibrant, in large part because of a $2 billion government rebuilding project after a massive dike collapse and slurry spill at a local coal plant. He says his constituents don’t like Obama because they’re Republicans. And they like Trump because he stands up to Obama.

GOP Delegates Say the Economy Is Terrible—Except Where They Live - POLITICO Magazine

If even a government rebuilding project reviving a local economy doesn't do the trick..

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LOL

When Americans are asked how the economy is doing, many of them just repeat what they think they heard on Fox News: By large margins, Republicans say that unemployment is up and the stock market is down under Mr. Obama, the opposite of the truth. On the other hand, when you ask people how well they personally are doing, the Obama years have been marked by large improvements — a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who see themselves as thriving.

Obama’s Trickle-Up Economics - The New York Times

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If only we had listened in 2012. If only we had elected Mitt Romney. If only we had placed more faith in the promises of Newt Gingrich and other Republicans. Just think where we’d be today. “I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6%, and perhaps a little lower,” Romney vowed on May 23, 2012.

When Romney made that promise, the nation’s unemployment rate was 8.2%. Today, that rate is 4.9%, according to the Labor Department. Beneath this headline figure are solid improvements across the board. In May 2012, the jobless rate was 7.4% for whites. Now: 4.3%. For blacks, it has fallen from 13.6% to 8.6%. For Hispanics: 11.0% then, 5.7% now. On and on. You can slice and dice the data down anyway you want—it shows big progress. As for the broader measure of unemployment, the “U-6” rate it was 14.8% then, 9.5% now.

Heck of a job, Mitt! And Gingrich, we should have listened to him too. “I’ve developed a program for American energy so no future president will ever bow to a Saudi king again and so every American can look forward to $2.50-a-gallon gasoline,” the former House Speaker promised on February 22, 2012. A gallon or regular was about $3.38 when he made that vow.

Talk about a pain in the gas. Today? It’s 34% lower: $2.23. As of mid-August, Americans have saved more than $38 billion this year alone on gas—giving consumer spending a boost across the board. And it’s Saudi Arabia that’s now on the economic ropes—and Russia too—as their oil-dependent economies sag under two years of low prices. Read earlier column: Russia, China and Saudi Arabia are on the ropes If only we had listened to Newt!

Republican economic promises have been achieved — by Obama - MarketWatch

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Trump boasting about the stock market which he called a bubble as a candidate. And indeed, he's doing pretty well:





Until you see this:





It's all a bit of harmless fun of course, no hard conclusions are warranted.