Thursday, August 20, 2009

Flawed Logic Used in Partisan Attack on Obama

In the March 3, 2009 article "The Obama Economy," The Wall Street Journal argued that the decline of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the Dow) in the first six weeks of Barack Obama's presidency was evidence of the failure of his economic policies. The Dow had fallen from 7949 on Inauguration Day (January 20) to 6763 on March 2. Today (August 20), the Dow closed at 9350. That is more than a 17% increase in the first seven months of Obama's administration. (Try getting that rate of return from a bank account.) So why hasn't The Wall Street Journal published a follow up story explaining how this significant increase in the stock market proves that Obama's policies were right all along?

The answer is that the original story was a cheap, partisan, unsigned attack based on flawed logic. See my original critique of the article for an explanation.

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