This Just In ...
Kevin Fischer is a veteran broadcaster, the recipient of over 150 major journalism awards from the Milwaukee Press Club, the Wisconsin Associated Press, the Northwest Broadcast News Association, the Wisconsin Bar Association, and others. He has been seen and heard on Milwaukee TV and radio stations for over three decades. A longtime aide to state Senate Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature, Kevin can be seen offering his views on the news on the public affairs program, "InterCHANGE," on Milwaukee Public Television Channel 10, and heard filling in on Newstalk 1130 WISN. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, and their lovely baby daughter, Kyla Audrey, in Franklin.
Bad, but not Jimmy Carter bad
My friend Joel McNally’s summer home is on Mars. Ultra-lefty McNally, the king of the outrageous statements, uttered another in his long line of preposterous pronouncements last Friday night on Milwaukee Public Television’s InterCHANGE when he yammered one of the popular talking points of early 2009: We’re living in the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Anybody who’s been alive or read a newspaper the past 30 years knows that’s not even close to being true so I simply had to interject that the embarrassing years of the Carter Administration when America was at one of its lowest points in its glorious history were worse than what we’re experiencing today. I reminded my co-panelist of the double-digit percentage everything we as a nation suffered under the peanut farmer who invented the “Misery Index.”
The flustered McNally took my assertion as an assault on a liberal president. Oh well…
Actually, it was a fact. I made it clear on television that the current economy is rough (And don't anyone lecture me about tough times. I've been unemployed four times in my career). But the worst since the Great Depression? No sir.
Under Jimmy Carter:
16 percent inflation
22 percent interest rates
18 percent mortgage rates
10 percent unemployment
70 percent marginal tax rates
One of the reasons the economy that, I’ll grant you has seen much better days, is viewed as so horrific is summed up well by Bruce Bialosky, the founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition of California:
“The problem with most of the people regarding the current economy comes from never having experienced a real recession.”
But does the economy warrant a panic?
Bialosky writes that we need to get a grip.
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