Response: July 15.
Lawyer’s question: What year?
Response: Every year.
There’s been one major theory on this blog about how my conservative counterpart (Bryan White) often works his blog’s “Grading PolitiFact” series: his leading modus operandi is to mischaracterize PolitiFact’s underlying argument in the case of Republicans, to something other than what their ideological agenda might be, something that “sounds good” and then assert in the most outrageous way he can that PolitiFact deliberately missed it, most likely due to PolitiFact’s bias. This ruling on Robert Reich is a classic case on the Liberal side. In his PBS piece, Robert Reich defined a period of time, set the bounds of it, using Commerce Department statistics. He could just as well have used “since 1929” as he could have “just before the Great Depression.” But my conservative counterpart thinks it’s all about the Great Depression, when the article suggests otherwise. The article was about American workers “whose jobs and wages are under assault” getting “the worst deal they’ve had since before Labor Day was invented” because, after all, he was writing this around Labor Day weekend.
Let’s talk about his “just before the Great Depression” assertions, anyway. Wikipedia, and most “lay people”, consider the Great Depression to have started in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed. But the stock market, as I just noted in a recent post, is a leading economic indicator. The actual downturn of the economy does not follow for two to three quarters. In the spring of 1930 the stock market actually turned up again briefly before the economy fell. So to say there was no data for the period before the Great Depression is actually a misnomer. Reich probably knew this as well when he made his comparison, as a political economist, and because there was actually a bit of data available for before the Great Depression. This, along with the Commerce Department data, explains why Reich used the word “just” as in “just before the Great Depression.”
Bryan White also argued it out with another commenter at the PolitiFact Facebook page, and the rival commenter, Aaron Speca, pointed out the same issue with Bryan’s criticism:
